Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Future reference 'without' future morphology(2024) Mendes, Jéssica Viana; Hacquard, Valentine; Santorio, Paolo; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In some languages, present morphology can be used to refer to non-scheduled future events. Since this form of future reference is constrained to certain subordinate environments, like conditional antecedents (‘If John gets a new job, he played his cards right’) and relative clauses (‘Everyone who gets invited to this party is very lucky’), I propose to call the phenomenon Subordinate Future (SF). Two factors have hindered our understanding of the SF: First, the SF often occurs in modalized sentences, which makes it difficult to tease apart its contribution from that of the environment. Second, present morphology in English can express several readings; therefore, the appearance of this future is not particularly informative. This dissertation brings new intra- and cross-linguistic evidence to bear on the nature and the meaning of the SF. I observe that, in addition to temporal displacement, the SF also introduces modal displacement. Then, I argue that the source of this modality is a subjunctive mood morpheme, which is silent in English, but pronounced in Portuguese. I proceed to decompose the semantics of the subjunctive. I propose that the subjunctive should be treated as a Heimian indefinite (Heim, 1982) ranging over situations. Simply put, the role of the subjunctive is to introduce a situation variable. The motivation for my proposal comes from the behavior of the subjunctive in relative clauses, and from the anaphoric pattern of sentences with the SF. In relative clauses, the SF blocks a specific reading of the DP. Besides that, the SF seems to be able to ‘bind’ the situation variable of predicates outside of its domain of c-command, giving rise to modal donkey anaphora. These two facts would be difficult to reconcile with a quantificational treatment of the subjunctive. I then turn my attention to the temporal interpretation of the phenomenon. As Crouch (1993, 1994) observed, this future is also able to anchor the temporal interpretation of clauses outside of its domain of c-command. I propose that this effect is a byproduct of modal donkey anaphora, and demonstrate how casting my proposal in terms of situations provides a natural account of the phenomenon. I conclude with a comparison between my proposal and existing accounts.Item Local Information in Discourse(2024) Kendrick, Jonathan Caleb; Williams, Alexander; Cariani, Fabrizio; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that the interpretation of modals, expressions like “might,” “should,” and “must,” are constrained by their local context. For epistemic modals, local contexts bound the admissible domains of modal quantification. In Chapter 2, we use this fact to explain why epistemic “must” is weaker than the □ operator from epistemic modal logic. For root (i.e., non-deontic) modals, local contexts restrict the domain of quantification. In Chapter 3, we show this yields a solution to the Samaritan Paradox concerning why deontic modals do not inherit presuppositions under entailment. In Chapter 4, we propose a solution to the “if ?, ought ?” problem based on default logic. According to this solution, “ought”’s ordering source consists of default rules and the domain consists of the conclusion of the defaults triggered in the local context.Item Finding modal force(2021) Dieuleveut, Anouk; Hacquard, Valentine; Williams, Alexander; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates when and how children figure out the force of modals, that is, when and how they learn that can/might express possibility, whereas must/have to express necessity. Learning modal force raises a logical “Subset Problem”: given that necessity entails possibility, what prevents learners from hypothesizing possibility meanings for necessity modals? Three main solutions to other Subset Problems have been proposed in the literature. The first is a bias towards strong (here, necessity) meanings, in the spirit of Berwick (1985). The second is a reliance on downward-entailing environments, which reverse patterns of entailment (Gualmini & Schwarz, 2009). The third is a reliance on pragmatic situational cues stemming from the conversational context in which modals are used (Dieuleveut et al., 2019). This dissertation assesses the viability of each, by examining the modals used in speech to and by 2-year-old English children, through a combination of corpus studies and experiments testing the guessability of modal force based on their context of use. I show that negative and other downward-entailing contexts are rare with necessity modals, making them impractical on their own. However, the conversational context in which modals are used in speech to children is highly informative about both forces. Thus, if learners are sensitive to these conversational cues, they, in principle, do not need to rely either on a necessity bias nor on negative environments to solve the Subset Problem. Turning to children’s own productions, I show that children master possibility modals very early: by age 2, they use them productively, and in an adult-like way. However, they struggle with necessity modals: they use them less frequently, and not in an adult-like way. Their modal uses show no evidence for a necessity bias. To assess how children actually figure out modal force, and which of the available cues children use to figure out modal force, I then examine which aspects of children’s input best predict their mastery of modals. Preliminary results suggest that negation is predictive of children’s early success with necessity modals, and that frequency of modal talk, but not of particular lexemes, also contributes to their early success.Item MODALS AND THEIR COMPLEMENTS IN DUTCH AND BEYOND(2020) van Dooren, Annemarie; Hacquard, Valentine; Polinsky, Maria; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I investigate the syntax and semantics of modals like can and must and their counterparts in other languages. Modals like can and must can be used to express both obligations (as in employees must wash their hands, called deontic modality) and possibilities given what is known (as in John must be home; his car isn't in the parking lot, called epistemic modality), but previous work shows that the availability of these different 'flavors' of modality are constrained by their syntactic environment. My main claim is that in all languages discussed, modal meanings are specifically restricted by their complement size. For English modals, which are treated as functional items that are part of the functional projections from the verb, this is often captured by having modals appear in different positions in the functional projection of the verb based on their modal flavor: Epistemic modals are located high, above tense, while non-epistemic modals, such as deontics, are located low, below aspect (Cinque 1999, Hacquard 2006, 2008, a.o.). I argue that in Dutch, modals are verbs (following Aelbrecht 2010), and as such, they host their own functional projections. Despite this, some of the same syntactic restrictions on the availability of modal flavor hold, which argues for a recasting of the cross-linguistic generalizations not in terms of position of the functional projection, but in terms of complement size. I claim that cross-linguistically, different flavors require different types of complements: epistemics need a complement the size of a Tense Phrase (in line with Cinque 1999, Hacquard 2006), deontics need the size of an Aspectual Phrase (building on Rubinstein 2012), while other non-epistemics can combine with a smaller-sized complement. I will provide two case studies in favor of the claim that complement size restricts the availability of modal flavors: In chapter 3, I will discuss the interaction between tense and modality, and in chapter 4, I will discuss the case of modals with non-verbal complements.