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By now: Change of state, epistemic modality and evidential inference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2020

DANIEL ALTSHULER  and
LAURA A. MICHAELIS Open the ORCID record for LAURA A. MICHAELIS [Opens in a new window]
DANIEL ALTSHULER*
Affiliation:
Hampshire College/University of Massachusetts Amherst
LAURA A. MICHAELIS*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado Boulder
*
Author’s address: School of Cognitive Science, Adele Simmons Hall, Hampshire College Amherst, MA 01002, USA[email protected]
Author’s address: Department of Linguistics, 295UBC,University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

We examine the constellation of factors – lexical, aspectual, temporal and conversational – that give rise to evidential implications from assertions. We target intensional and inferential meanings associated with a certain class of present-tense state sentences: those containing a temporal adverb headed by by, e.g. The American traveling public is pretty mature by now. We ask why present-tense sentences containing by temporal adverbs (BTAs) are improved by, and sometimes appear to require, an epistemic modal, e.g. They ??(must) live in a mansion by now. Key to our analysis is the idea that BTA sentences require the onset of a resultant state described by the complement of by now to overlap some unspecified time that precedes the time described by the adverb. The indefiniteness of the unspecified time described by BTAs leads interpreters to pragmatically construe present-tense BTA reports as conjectures, guesses or suppositions. We show how our analysis can be extended to incorporate the contribution of epistemic modals. Adopting insights from von Fintel & Gillies (2010) and Mandelkern (2016), we hypothesize the manner in which the BTA change schema is instantiated in intensional contexts and discuss the relationship between intensional and evidential contexts. We see the merging of aspectual and epistemic features in BTA sentences, and in particular present-tense sentences, as the result of a semantic reconciliation procedure: the use of an epistemic modal in a BTA predication evokes an observation or act of reasoning, prior to speech time, which permits the speaker to make her assertion, and this inference trigger is identified with the ‘onset event’ in the BTA schema.

Keywords

aspectconversational inferenceEnglish time adverbsevidentialitymodalitysemantics–pragmatics interfacetense
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 56 , Issue 3: Aspect beyond time , 01 August 2020 , pp. 515 - 539
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Sam Carter, Paul Kay, Matthew Mandelkern, Astrid De Wit, Frank Brisard, and three anonymous referees for Journal of Linguistics for insights and observations that have enhanced and improved this paper. We have no doubt received more good advice than we were able to implement.

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