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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 byby, e.g.The American traveling public is pretty mature by now. We ask why present-tense sentences containingbytemporal 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 ofby nowto 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.

Este trabalho discute propriedades morfológicas, sintáticas e semânticas dos verbos modais do português. Seguindo os pressupostos da Gramática Gerativo-Transformacional, este artigo discorre sobre dois problemas bastante caros à caracterização dos verbos modais, que têm a ver com seu estatuto de homônimos ou polissêmicos. Reanalisando o caráter “lexical” desses verbos bem como seu caráter “auxiliar”, este estudo defende que há apenas uma única entrada para dever e poder e que suas propriedades estruturais e interpretativas dependem da sintaxe e não do léxico. Para tanto, este trabalho advoga em favor de uma categoria MODAL, não como rótulo descritivo, mas como primitivo da gramática, e mostra quais as consequências teóricas e empíricas dessa proposta.

In this paper, we study the distribution and interpretation of a non-temporal use of the future tense in Italian, called ‘presumptive’ or ‘epistemic’, which we label here PF. We first distinguish PF from its closest modal relatives, namely epistemic necessity/possibility/likelihood modals, as well as weak necessity modals. We then propose an account of PF in declaratives and interrogatives that treats it as a special comparative subjective likelihood modal, and test its empirical predictions. A theoretical lesson drawn from this detailed study of the semantics of PF is that semantics needs sharpened theoretical tools to be able to capture the fine-grained distinctions languages make when it comes to signaling modulated epistemic commitment to a proposition.

This paper proposes that modal constructions can develop into conditional constructions in Mandarin Chinese and vice versa. Therefore, bidirectionality exists between these kinds of constructions diachronically. While bidirectionality is an apparent violation of unidirectionality, both directions of change are shown to be regular cases of procedural constructionalization, enabled by the fact that modal and conditional constructions can perform identical indirect speech acts (i.e., they are performatively equivalent) and instances of one may be morphosyntactically categorized as the other in Chinese (i.e., they are morphosyntactically vague). A crosslinguistically generalizable prediction is then proposed: bidirectionality is possible if instances of two constructions are performatively equivalent and morphosyntactically vague with respect to each other in certain contexts.

This contribution discusses pragmatic linguistic aspects that indicate professional credibility in three popular digital knowledge dissemination platforms. Credibility here does not refer to the correspondence of platform content to ‘reality’, but to the pragmatic metalanguage interaction of researchers and platforms. Whereas Wikipedia is only a platform for distributing (multi-modal) information, Academia.edu and ResearchGate include a messaging system. Given their millions of users, all three systems include automated replies by (programmed) agents (bots), which can be classified as share, profit, and vanity agents – and only the first is usually perceived as a credible communication partner by a (linguistic) researcher. An analysis of pragmatic metalanguage (incl. interactive pronouns and reader address) makes this clear. Whereas Wikipedia only addresses its readers collectively in Wikipedia community style, Academia.edu and ResearchGate address their users individually; thus the first mentioned uses few personal pronouns, the latter many of them. For Academia.edu and ResearchGate, the internal platform structures and agents' email messages can be compared. A pragmatic corpus-linguistic evaluation of their (automated) language shows partly contrasting functions: some linguistic cues (e.g. modal auxiliaries) enhance the “sharing” community, others profit and vanity. For successful academic interaction, persuasive polite cooperation language contributes to the impression of credibility and professionalism.

This work analyses the speech-act of arguing as proposed by Linguistic Normative Model of Argumentation (LNMA) with the help of diagrams, examples and basic formalization techniques. The focus is set on one of the most novel issues of LNMA, modal qualification, and the distinction between epistemic and ontological modals. The first conclusion is that employing LNMA in order to analyse and evaluate actual argumentation as it is proposed is too complex to be applied as is. The second conclusion, at a theoretical level, is that the distinction between ontological and epistemic modals is highly problematic in LNMA.

The grammaticalization literature has not demonstrated convincingly how, if at all, dynamic modals may develop into conditional protasis connectives. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence from Chinese, this paper hypothesizes that such a directionality may arise through univerbation between dynamic modals and protasis connectives (e.g. ruò ‘if’ + néng ‘be able to’ > ruònéng ‘if’). Furthermore, this paper suggests that functional compatibility in terms of performativity may explain why dynamic modals tend to grammaticalize into connectives in pre-established conditional protases, while deontic and epistemic modals do so in main clauses.

This essay calls attention to a set of linguistic interactions between counterfactual conditionals, on one hand, and possibility modals like could have and might have, on the other. These data present a challenge to the popular variably strict semantics for counterfactual conditionals. Instead, they support a version of the strict conditional semantics in which counterfactuals and possibility modals share a unified quantificational domain. I’ll argue that pragmatic explanations of this evidence are not available to the variable analysis. And putative counterexamples to the unified strict analysis, on careful inspection, in fact support it. Ultimately, the semantics of conditionals and modals must be linked together more closely than has sometimes been recognized, and a unified strict semantics for conditionals and modals is the only way to fully achieve this.

In most cases, a wh-question calls for an answer that names an entity in the set denoted by the extension of the wh-complement. However, evidence from questions with necessity modals and questions with collective predicates argues that sometimes a wh-question must be interpreted with a higher-order reading, in which this question calls for an answer that names a generalized quantifier. This paper investigates the distribution and compositional derivation of higher-order readings of wh-questions. First, I argue that the generalized quantifiers that can serve as semantic answers to wh-questions must be homogeneously positive. Next, on the distribution of higher-order readings, I observe that questions in which the wh-complement is singular-marked or numeral-modified can be answered by elided disjunctions but not by conjunctions. I further present two ways to account for this disjunction–conjunction asymmetry. In the uniform account, these questions admit disjunctions because disjunctions (but not conjunctions) may satisfy the atomicity requirement of singular-marking and the cardinality requirement of numeral modification. In the reconstruction account, the wh-complement is syntactically reconstructed, which gives rise to local uniqueness and yields a contradiction for conjunctive answers.

The aim of this paper is to examine commands and division of duties in the laws, decrees and ordinances from 1840 and 1845. We employed the following methods in our analysis: functional, stylistic, syntactic, linguistic, historical and discourse analysis. We have come to the conclusion that the modal verb should within the deep structure of the legal texts, ought to be expressed on the surface structure via (in)expressive means. Stern orders are connected to certain professions such as soldiers or government officials. More lenient orders and suggestions are connected with situations where the legislator is of a lower rank than the addressee. Additional expressiveness is conditioned by the lexical and semantic properties of the verbs, the use of negation, additional qualifiers and the accumulation of examples.

The Deep Bidirectional LSTM (DBLSTM) with recurrent capability using the old conventional HMM modals performing very well and responding and providing a state-of-the-art technology with very good performance on the on various languages and speech database. Even with the current technologies, the outputs in these works relying on recurrent base neural network schemes. On account of explicit target strategies, it turns out to be extremely hard to coordinate the current day accessible discourse acknowledgment techniques due to the current huge jargon discourse acknowledgment frameworks. This research investigates the possibility of using the DBLSTM as speech acoustic speech miniature in which a calibre neural network scheme with HMM that is a hybrid structure. With few experimental findings we observed that the DBLSTM-HMM hybrid gives better and higher performance and provides better results on various NN schemes and all other previous works the previous works. It is also observed that it outclasses both conventional and deep network benchmarks on a most of the known existing algorithms. The improvements which are occurring in word error rate in the deep network algorithms is modest, considering the fact that a significant elevate in slice level precision. We propose an hybrid technique in which DBLSTM and HMM emerge to be exactly matched for tasks where acoustic modeling and speech prosodies predominates. To add more investigation, need to be conducted on large database and also need to see whether this is working on some specific languages.

Languages offer various ways to report what someone said. There is now a vast but heterogeneous literature on speech report constructions scattered throughout the semantics literature. We offer a bird’s eye view of the entire landscape of reporting and propose a classification along two dimensions: at-issue vs. not-at-issue, and eventive vs. non-eventive. This bird’s eye perspective leads to genuinely new insights, for instance on the nature of quotative evidentials and reportative moods, viz., that they are both eventive, and hence semantically more like some types of direct and indirect speech than reportative evidentials and modals are. EARLY ACCESS

The geographical system can be recognized as a giant complex system, and the comprehensive study of geography is of great importance in understanding the complex geographical system as a whole. With the rapid development of geographical research, geographic synthesis has become the fundamental task of geographical innovation and breakthrough in the new era. The development of theoretical methods of geographic synthesis has become a critical way to prevent the hollowing out of geography and establish the core theory of geography. However, the conventional practice of geographic synthesis prefers to “divide first and synthesize last”, which formed the dilemma of “easy to divide but difficult to synthesize”. Therefore, the system of geographic synthesis method requires further exploration. From the perspective of geographical cognition, analysis, and synthesis, this paper summarized the state-of-art research and methods of geographic synthesis, identified the root causes that hinder the development of geographic synthesis methods, and puts forward a new conception of developing the method of geographic synthesis research based on “geographic modal”. Compared to the modal and modal analysis methods in the domain of structural systems, geographic modal, as the description form and expression mechanism of regular cognition of the geographical system, is a higher-level abstract carrier than geographical elements and processes. This paper analyzed the characteristics and composition of geographic modal. Based on the regular geographical cognition of spatial patterns, evolution processes, and interaction mechanisms, the integrated and systematic cognition of the geographical system can be formed by the organic aggregation and orderly iteration of multilevel geographic modals. This strategy is expected to benefit the comprehensive research and model reconstruction of the geographical system. This paper aims to sketch a full-stage pathway of geographic synthesis research to address two scientific problems: (1) How to use the overall characteristics of geographic modal to construct cognitive models and representation methods of geographic synthesis, and (2) how to construct detection, analysis and aggregation methods of geographic modal based on the structural characteristics of geographic modal. The research method of geographic synthesis based on the geographic modal will open a two-way channel from fragmental geographical cognition to comprehensive geographical cognition. In addition, modal-based geographic synthesis can be employed to construct new methods to step from geographical data to geographical law and further to comprehensive geographical cognition. This study potentially promotes the collaborative evolution of theories and methods of geographic synthesis, and it is also expected to facilitate the development of geographic synthesis research.

In order to eliminate traces as stipulated grammatical objects, syntactic movement has been reformulated in terms of multiple-merge : it is the result of the same constituent being merged into the structure multiple times, using either copies or multidominance structures . In spite of their empirical and conceptual advantages, multiple-merge theories pose known challenges for the semantic interpretation of movement, as there are no variable-denoting traces in lower positions. The most common means of resolving this conundrum is trace conversion (Fox 2002, 2003), in which either a syntactic operation makes alterations at lower merge sites in order to generate trace-like interpretations, or the semantics behaves as if such a syntactic operation had occurred. In this paper I discuss problems faced by presently formulated versions of trace conversion and propose an alternative, compositional trace conversion , in which multiple-merge structures can be directly interpreted in a straightforwardly compositional manner. This approach is shown to generalize well, extending to modals and degree phrases as well as DPs. EARLY ACCESS

This paper investigates the semantics of the suffix -NE in Javanese (Austronesian; Indonesia), bringing to light new findings to bear on the composition of modal strength distinctions. In a transparent manner, this functional morpheme derives weak necessity modals from strong necessity modals, but cannot attach to possibility modals to derive weak possibility. Javanese thereby takes a different compositional route to weak necessity than most Indo-European languages, which might lexicalise modal strength distinctions or rely on counterfactual morphology for that purpose. We propose a new type of domain restriction analysis for weak necessity to capture both the defining properties of weak necessity as well as the restriction in Javanese to only necessity modals. Specifically, we propose that -NE requires quantification over a non-empty subset of a minimal witness set for the original quantification. The Javanese data thus show that weak necessity is not a unified phenomenon across languages, and our analysis contributes to a model of crosslinguistic variation concerning the relationship between gradability and modality, and the semantics of weak modal strength. EARLY ACCESS

A simple but important task during the analysis of a textual requirements specification is to determine which statements in the specification represent requirements. In principle, by following suitable writing and markup conventions, one can provide an immediate and unequivocal demarcation of requirements at the time a specification is being developed. However, neither the presence nor a fully accurate enforcement of such conventions is guaranteed. The result is that, in many practical situations, analysts end up resorting to after-the-fact reviews for sifting requirements from other material in a requirements specification. This is both tedious and time-consuming. We propose an automated approach for demarcating requirements in free-form requirements specifications. The approach, which is based on machine learning, can be applied to a wide variety of specifications in different domains and with different writing styles. We train and evaluate our approach over an independently labeled dataset comprised of 33 industrial requirements specifications. Over this dataset, our approach yields an average precision of 81.2% and an average recall of 95.7%. Compared to simple baselines that demarcate requirements based on the presence of modal verbs and identifiers, our approach leads to an average gain of 16.4% in precision and 25.5% in recall. We collect and analyze expert feedback on the demarcations produced by our approach for industrial requirements specifications. The results indicate that experts find our approach useful and efficient in practice. We developed a prototype tool, named DemaRQ, in support of our approach. To facilitate replication, we make available to the research community this prototype tool alongside the non-proprietary portion of our training data.

How do we know thatwould ratherandmay wellare more idiomatic thanwould wellorwill really? Can this intuition be measured systematically in usage data? Traditionally, modal idioms suchhad/’d better,would/’d ratherormight (as) wellare seen as distinct from more compositional collocations, which may be modally harmonic (could possibly,will probably) or not (could also,might even). Yet the collocation of modal auxiliaries + adverbs (mod + adv)is more complex than suggested by a binary classification into idioms and non-idioms. This article uses data from COCA and the method of collostructional analysis to show that the difference between qualitatively distinct types ofmod + advis a matter of degree. Modal idiomaticity should be seen as gradient along a continuum from strong association (would rather) to strong dissociation (would well). The results support assumptions that statistical information about the collocational behavior of modal auxiliaries is a cue for the scope of adverbial modification and is thus an important aspect of speakers’ knowledge of modal meaning. The study contributes to recent approaches to modality from a ‘combinatorial’ perspective, which recognizes the importance of the lexical environment in core areas of grammar.

Motivated by an increasing use of social media for the expression of personal stance towards a certain target, we analyse the language used to produce such opinionated content with expressions of sentiment, which represents the main data source for sentiment analysis. We use the first manually annotated corpus for sentiment analysis of the Serbian language developed for the service sector of higher education. Our study focuses on how various linguistic constructions, used in different context, influence the sentiment polarity of a text. Our findings indicate that sentiment expressions and negation have a most significant role in determining whether the text conveys positive, neutral, or negative sentiment, while intensifiers (words which either increase or decrease sentiment) have a considerable influence on sentiment intensity. We also present an analysis of the impact of conjunctions, conditional sentences, comparative and modal verbs, and pronouns on sentiment polarity and intensity. Based on the derived observations, we propose a set of rules that could be integrated with machine learning algorithms into an automated sentiment analysis system for the Serbian language. Our findings also make a much-needed contribution to the few currently available resources for natural language processing of Serbian.

This paper presents experimental data relevant to understanding the modal free choice effect (Kamp, 1973) when there are more than two disjuncts under the relevant modal operator. The results sugge...

The received wisdom on ability modals is that they differ from their epistemic and deontic cousins in what inferences they license and better receive a universal or conditional analysis instead of an existential one. The goal of this paper is to sharpen the empirical picture about the semantics of ability modals, and to propose an analysis that explains what makes the can of ability so special but that also preserves the crucial idea that all uses of can share a common lexical semantics. The resulting framework combines tools and techniques from dynamic and inquisitive semantics with insights from the literature of the role of agency in deontic logic. It explains not only why the can of ability, while essentially being an existential modal operator, sometimes resists distribution over disjunction and interacts with its duals in particular and hitherto unnoticed ways, but also has a tendency to license free choice inferences.

Disjunctions in the scope of possibility modals give rise to a conjunctive inference, generally referred to as ‘free choice.’ For example, Emma can take Spanish or Calculus suggests that Emma can take Spanish and can take Calculus. This inference is not valid on standard semantics for modals in combination with a Boolean semantics for disjunction. Hence free choice has sparked a whole industry of theories in philosophy of language and semantics. This paper investigates free choice in sentences involving a non-monotonic modified numeral, under which we embed a possibility modal scoping over disjunction. One example is Exactly one student can(not) take Spanish or Calculus. As we point out, the presence (or absence) of certain readings of these sentences is a key test for a prominent approach, which analyzes free choice as a kind of scalar implicature. We report on two experiments investigating the readings of such sentences, using an inferential task. Our results are challenging for the implicature approach. We sketch two possible solutions within this approach, either adopting a different recent implicature algorithm, or exploring a different meaning for modified numerals with exactly. Both of them suffer from a variety of problems. We then discuss a third solution, which exploits a recent account of free choice based on homogeneity. This approach can account for our results, in combination with plausible assumptions about homogeneity projection, though it too has open issues with related cases. Regardless of which solution is chosen, non-monotonic contexts turn out to be an important test case for theories of free choice, implicature, and modified numerals.

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of attempts to apply the mathematical theory of probability to the semantics of natural language probability talk. These sorts of “probabilistic” semantics are often motivated by their ability to explain intuitions about inferences involving “likely” and “probably”—intuitions that Angelika Kratzer’s canonical semantics fails to accommodate through a semantics based solely on an ordering of worlds and a qualitative ranking of propositions. However, recent work by Wesley Holliday and Thomas Icard has been widely thought to undercut this motivation: they present a world-ordering semantics that yields essentially the same logic as probabilistic semantics. In this paper, I argue that the challenge remains: defenders of world-ordering semantics have yet to offer a plausible semantics that captures the logic of comparative likelihood. Holliday & Icard’s semantics yields an adequate logic only if models are restricted to Noetherian pre-orders. But I argue that the Noetherian restriction faces problems in cases involving infinitely large domains of epistemic possibilities. As a result, probabilistic semantics remains the better explanation of the data.

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a process to automate the text or speech of Natural Languages. This automation is mainly conducted for Western languages. The Arabic Language got less focus in this area. This paper presents a Model to recognize an Arabic sentence. A new morphological model based on regular expressions is developed to recognize the Arabic verbs. A hash table containing all Arabic three-letters' root of verbs is implemented. The total number of Arabic verbs that are derived from three-letters' root size is 23090. The number of roots is 6104. A set of rules forming the Arabic grammar is used to derive and analyze the syntax of Arabic sentences. About 87% of the verbs represented in our regular expressions' engine are detected. Moreover, the sentences are also recognized. In several Surat of the Quran, only 9% of the detected verbs are false-positive (a non-verb declared as a verb), and 4% are considered false-negative (a verb is considered as a noun). This rate is mainly because we are not using vowels even that the Quran (our case study) is using them. The reason behind our decision is to be able to handle all Arabic texts, which mostly are not using vowels.

The view that if-clauses function semantically as restrictors is widely regarded as the only candidate for a fully general account of conditionals. The standard implementation of this view assumes that, where no operator to be restricted is in sight, if-clauses restrict covert epistemic modals. Stipulating such modals, however, lacks independent motivation and leads to wrong empirical predictions. In this paper I provide a theory of conditionals on which if-clauses are uniformly interpreted as restrictors, but no covert modals are postulated. Epistemic if-clauses, like those in bare conditionals, restrict an information state parameter which is used to interpret an expressive layer of the language. I show that this theory yields an attractive account of bare and overtly modalized conditionals and solves various empirical problems for the standard view, while dispensing with its less plausible assumption.

One of the most distinctive linguistic characteristics of modern academic writing is its reliance on nominalized structures. These include nouns that have been morphologically derived from verbs (e.g., development, progression) as well as verbs that have been ‘converted’ to nouns (e.g., increase, use). Almost any sentence taken from an academic research article will illustrate the use of such structures. For example, consider the opening sentences from three education research articles; derived nominalizations are underlined and converted nouns given in italics: 1

We propose a cross-modal transformer-based neural correction models that refines the output of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system so as to exclude ASR errors. Generally, neural correction models are composed of encoder-decoder networks, which can directly model sequence-to-sequence mapping problems. The most successful method is to use both input speech and its ASR output text as the input contexts for the encoder-decoder networks. However, the conventional method cannot take into account the relationships between these two different modal inputs because the input contexts are separately encoded for each modal. To effectively leverage the correlated information between the two different modal inputs, our proposed models encode two different contexts jointly on the basis of cross-modal self-attention using a transformer. We expect that cross-modal self-attention can effectively capture the relationships between two different modals for refining ASR hypotheses. We also introduce a shallow fusion technique to efficiently integrate the first-pass ASR model and our proposed neural correction model. Experiments on Japanese natural language ASR tasks demonstrated that our proposed models achieve better ASR performance than conventional neural correction models., Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2021

The purpose of this research is to know the students' ability in using question tags in the modal auxiliary format eleventh grade of SMA PGRI Tembilahan. Based on the limitation of the problem, the researcher limits the problem in using question tag in modal auxiliary form just focuses on the use modal of can, could, will, would, and should. The researcher conducted a short observation to know the number of classes at the eleventh grade of SMA PGRI Tembilahan. The number of eleventh-grade students just consists of one class, namely Class A. The total of the eleventh-grade students is 20 students. The population of this research was all of the eleventh-grade students because the sample of population less than 100 the researcher used total sampling technique. The researcher used a quantitative method to get the data needed. The research instrument in this research is testing and collected by individual test scores of students where they are asked to identify and using question tags according to the instruction given with the total correct (25). So that, each correct question tag in the modal auxiliary form will be scored by 4. Based on the result of the test, the mean score of the question tag in the modal auxiliary form was 82.6. It was categorized very high level, which included in the interval 81-100. Where 14 students get in a very good score, 5 students get in a good score, 1 student gets in a moderate score and there is no get in a low and very low score. Based on that explanation above, we can conclude that the students' ability in using question tag in modal auxiliary format eleventh grade of SMA PGRI Tembilahan includes in the realm of the category nice and understanding to use question tag in modal auxiliary form.

This article argues that the logical paraphrases used to describe the meanings of must, need, may, and can obscure the natural-language semantic interaction between these verbs and negation. The purported non-negatability of must is argued to be an illusion created by the indicative-mood paraphrase ‘is necessary’, which treats the necessity as a reality rather than a non-reality. It is proposed that negation coalesces with the modality that must itself expresses to produce a negatively-charged version of must’s modality: the subject of musn’t is represented as being in a state of constraint in which the only possibility open to the subject is oriented in the opposite direction to the realization of the infinitive’s event. The study also constitutes an argument against a lexicalization analysis: in the combination mustn’t, must and not each contribute their own meaning to the resultant sense, but according to their conceptual status as inherently irrealis notions.

This article reports on the analysis of three major markers of necessity in Luganda, i.e. the modal auxiliaries -téekw- and -lina and the verbal prefix -andi-. On the basis a 4-million-word corpus it is argued that, overall, the auxiliary -téekw- is more established as a necessity marker, as it is involved in the expression of all necessity subcategories except participant-inherent dynamic necessity. The auxiliary -lina is less semantically diversified, expressing only participant-imposed, situational and deontic necessity, while the verbal prefix -andi- expresses only deontic necessity. A comparison of corpus data with data from older literature on Luganda further shows that the objective category of participant-inherent dynamic necessity, which is not associated with any of the three markers described, is perhaps expressed by less-grammaticalised forms. These forms are also, together with other grammaticalised forms that have increasingly become rare, assumed to be part of the devices that could have been responsible for expressing necessity in earlier stages of the language, given that the three markers described in this research have only begun to meaningfully express necessity since the second half of the 20th century.

This paper examines a type of existential there sentence found in Middle English that has been argued to have a structure similar to transitive expletive constructions (TECs) in other Germanic languages, or to follow from the presence of NegP below T during the relevant period. Based on an exhaustive analysis of the 74 examples of this construction found in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (out of a total of over six thousand sentences from 1125 to 1913 containing there coded as expletive), we observe that 67 contain both a modal verb and clausal negation licensing a negative associate, unlike TECs found in other Germanic languages, and that the construction is found only between 1390 and 1600. We argue that the availability of this construction was due to a transitory alignment of three syntactic properties in this stage of the language: (i) modals were still main verbs merged within vP, but took a reduced complement consisting of only an inner clausal phase, and did not take a thematic external argument; (ii) English still had negative concord; (iii) Voice and viewpoint Aspect shared a single syntactic projection. The confluence of these three factors provided a non-thematic specifier position, [Spec,vP], into which there could merge. Before the late 14th century, modals were full verbs taking a thematic external argument and full clausal complements, and after about 1600, they were merged directly in T, occurring in a monoclausal rather than a (reduced) biclausal structure. At no point did the English monoclausal spine have the structural room to accommodate a true Germanic TEC.

I propose an account of indicative conditionals that combines features of minimal change semantics and information semantics. As in information semantics, conditionals are interpreted relative to an information state in accordance with the Ramsey test idea: “if p then q” is supported at a state s iff q is supported at the hypothetical state s[p] obtained by restricting s to the p-worlds. However, information states are not modeled as simple sets of worlds, but by means of a Lewisian system of spheres. Worlds in the inner sphere are considered possible; worlds outside of it are ruled out, but to different degrees. In this way, even when a state supports “not p”, it is still possible to suppose p consistently. I argue that this account does better than its predecessors with respect to a set of desiderata concerning inferences with conditionals. In particular, it captures three important facts: (i) that a conditional is logically independent from its antecedent; (ii) that a sequence of antecedents behaves like a single conjunctive antecedent (the import-export equivalence); and (iii) that conditionals restrict the quantification domain of epistemic modals. I also discuss two ways to construe the role of a premise, and propose a generalized notion of entailment that keeps the two apart.

Language interference is one of the most common problems in foreign language teaching. Language learners inevitably apply knowledge of their native language to a second language, which leads to linguistic interference. The more differences there are between the two languages, the more prominent the interference between them will be. This paper examines the key issues faced by Russian students learning English and English-speaking students learning Russian and suggests key areas of teaching needed in both disciplines.

The path opened by themodern language understanding that started with Saussure in 19thcentury gave rise to new approaches in language studies, and new methodsemerged as a result of these new approaches. While this new perspective createdcertain new concepts regarding the language, certain terms in the traditionalgrammar were started to be reinvestigated and examined. The recent developmentsin the field of linguistics have led to the development of new theories thatfeature functionality rather than formalism, and this drew attention to thenecessity of function-oriented studies. In traditional grammar approaches thatwere based on formalism, the concepts modal and modality were examinedunidimensionally both in terms of their designation and the functions theymarked. Nevertheless, as meaning in the language is too large to fit any form,it is impossible to solely depend on the modals in expressing emotions, whichare exclusively grammatical groups. Each emoting of an individual is namedmodalities, and it is expressed in the process of communication sometimes usingmodal affixes, sometimes modality markers, and sometimes suprasegmental soundunits. In the present study, utterances expressing request modality inHistorical Kipchak Turkish texts were addressed, and the sub-modal values andthe structural elements used to express them were investigated. That therequest modal -e/a in modernTurkish spoken in Turkey has not yet been formed in Kipchak Turkish era alsomade it obligatory to use different modal morphemes and structures inexpressing the request modality. Especially the affix –ġay/-gey from which certain researchers propounds that the request modal -e/-a originates, imperative modal affixesfor their dominant meaning of request in first person conjugation among theever-controversial subjects in the imperative modal paradigm, the desiderative affix -sa/ -se used aspredicates in sentences, and modality verbs such as “tile-, kirek” in utterances are some of the structures seen inreporting the request mode in Kipchak Turkish era., 19.yy.da Saussure ilebaşlayan çağdaş dil anlayışının açtığı yol, dil çalışmalarında yeniyaklaşımların doğmasını sağlamış ve bu yaklaşımlar sonucu yeni yöntemler ortayaçıkmıştır. Bu yeni bakış açısı, dille ilgili birtakım yeni kavramlar üretirkengeleneksel dil bilgisinde yer alan birtakım terimler de yeniden ele alınıp irdelenmeye başlanmıştır. Sonyıllarda dilbilim alanındaki gelişmeler biçimsellikten ziyade işlevselliği önplana çıkaran yeni kuramların gelişmesini sağlamış, bu durum da işlev odaklıçalışmaların gerekliliğine dikkat çekmiştir. Biçimselliğeağırlık veren geleneksel dil bilgisi yaklaşımlarında kip ve kiplikkavramları gerek adlandırılmaları gerekse işaretledikleri işlevler bakımındantek boyutlu olarak değerlendirilmekteydi. Oysa dilde anlam, biçimesığdırılamayacak kadar geniş olduğundan duygu durumlarını ifade etmede yalnızcagramatikal bir ulam olan kiplere bağlıkalmak mümkün değildir. Bireylerin duygu durumlarının her biri kiplik olarakadlandırılır ve iletişim sürecinde kimi zaman kip ekleri, kimi zaman kiplikişaretleyicileri, kimi zaman ise parçalarüstü ses birimleri kullanılarak ifadeedilir. Dilde sayısız kiplik alan vardır. Bu çalışmada Tarihî Kıpçak Türkçesimetinlerinde isteme kipliği bildiren sözceler ele alınarak alt kiplik değerlerive bunları ifade etmede yararlanılan yapı unsurları ele alınmıştır. GünümüzTürkiye Türkçesinde istek kipi eki –e/-a’nın, Kıpçak Türkçesi döneminde henüzoluşmamış olması da isteme kipliği ifade etmede farklı yapılardan ve kipbiçimbirimlerinden faydalanılmasını zorunlu kılmıştır. Özellikle istek kipi eki–e/-a’nın kökeninin dayandığı ileri sürülen –ġay/-geyeki, emir kipi paradigmasında halen tartışmalı konulardan biri olan 1.şahıs çekimlerinde ağır basan istek anlamından dolayı emir kipi ekleri, cümlelerde yüklem görevinde kullanılan dilek-şart –sa/-se eki, sözcelerde geçen“tile-, kirek” gibi kiplik fiillerTarihî Kıpçak Türkçesi döneminde isteme kipliği bildirmede görülen yapılardanbazılarıdır.

I show that standard dynamic approaches to the semantics of epistemic modals invalidate the classical laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction, as well as the law of ‘epistemic non-contradicti...

This study offers an in-depth analysis of the English modal auxiliaries CAN and COULD, using both spoken and written components of the British National Corpus. An examination of previous corpus-based studies of the modal auxiliaries CAN and COULD highlights discrepancies in the terminology utilised and the main categories associated with CAN and COULD, as well as insufficient surrounding context for a confident categorisation and a lack of clarity in explanations for classification. Based on findings from a new investigation of these modal auxiliaries in the BNC, I argue for a wider range of usage categories for CAN and COULD. The categories identified here differ from those reported in previous studies, as the present study differentiates categories of use beyond the traditional distinction between ‘ability’, ‘possibility’ and ‘permission’. This study offers transparency on categorical criteria and the usage category assigned to individual tokens and demonstrates expanded context is an essential requirement in the semantic and pragmatic (re)analysis of corpus data.

According to Kratzer’s influential account of epistemic must and might, these operators involve quantification over domains of possibilities determined by a modal base and an ordering source. Recently, this account has been challenged by invoking contexts of ‘epistemic tension’: i.e., cases in which an assertion that must $$\phi $$ is conjoined with the possibility that $$\lnot \phi $$ , and cases in which speakers try to downplay a previous assertion that must $$\phi $$ , after finding out that $$\lnot \phi $$ . Epistemic tensions have been invoked from two directions. Von Fintel and Gillies (Nat Lang Semant 18(4):351–383, 2010) propose a return to a simpler modal logic-inspired account: must and might still involve universal and existential quantification, but the domains of possibilities are determined solely by realistic modal bases. In contrast, Lassiter (Nat Lang Semant 24(2):117–163, 2016), following Swanson (Interactions with context. Ph.D. thesis, MIT, 2006; and in A. Eagan and B. Weatherstone, eds., Epistemic Modality, Oxford UP, 2011), proposes a more revisionary account which treats must and might as probabilistic operators. In this paper, we present a series of experiments to obtain reliable data on the degree of acceptability of various contexts of epistemic tension. Our experiments include novel variations that, we argue, are required to make progress in this debate. We show that restricted quantificational accounts a la Kratzer fit the overall pattern of results better than either of their recent competitors. In addition, our results help us identify the key components of restricted quantificational accounts, and on that basis propose some refinements and general constraints that should be satisfied by any account of the modal auxiliaries.

Since the bilateral commerce between the USA and China changes greatly and Chinese government continues to reform and delegate power in the economic field, it is of importance to study the Uniform Commercial Code of the USA (hereinafter referred to as the UCC). The study specifically studies the features of modal verbs in the UCC through the comparison with the United States Code (hereinafter referred to as the USC) and Frown. With the help of Antconc, the distribution of modal verbs, the modal value of the three sets of corpora are examined and analyzed based on the theory of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar. The results show that there are significant differences between the three sets of corpora and the three main features of modal verbs in the UCC are: the high frequency use of may, the relatively lower frequency use of legal modal verb shall, and the much higher frequency of must and may not. The seemingly contrary usages within the UCC are discussed and explained with the background of the legislation and the legal thoughts of the major legislator in a sociosemiotic approach. With both the quantitative and qualitative analysis combining the examples, the study hopes to shed light on the related legal translation and further enhance the understanding of the modal verbs in the UCC as well as legal discourse in a more general context.

With the rapid extension of social network, a huge amount of text and multimedia data concerning venues have constantly been generated. More and more people now try to obtain others’ reviews on one venue from the different social network places. Thus, it is essential to analyze both text and multimedia content in an integral manner to get a better venue semantic evaluation, which can effectively be applied to several applications such as travel recommendation, venue summarization, emergency monitoring. In this paper, we propose a novel multimedia location emotion recognition model to handle this problem. First, we utilize traditional and classic emotion multimedia datasets to train several recognition models according to different modals. Then, we propose a novel method to fuse the recognition results provided by these different pre-train recognition models and output the emotion label of the given venue. Finally, we recommend the related venues to users with respect to the emotion label. In order to demonstrate the performance of our approach, we collect the related location multimedia data. The related experiments also demonstrate the superiority of our approach.

This paper explores the relationship between dynamic and truth conditional semantics for epistemic modals. It provides a generalization of a standard dynamic update semantics for modals. This new semantics derives a Kripke semantics for modals and a standard dynamic semantics for modals as special cases. The semantics allows for new characterizations of a variety of principles in modal logic, including the inconsistency of ‘p and might not p’. Finally, the semantics provides a construction procedure for transforming any truth conditional semantics for modals into a dynamic semantics for modals with similar properties.

Bare plural generic sentences pervade ordinary talk. And yet it is extremely controversial what semantics to assign to such sentences. In this paper, I achieve two tasks. First, I develop a novel classification of the various standard uses to which bare plurals may be put. This “variety data” is important—it gives rise to much of the difficulty in systematically theorizing about bare plurals. Second, I develop a novel account of bare plurals, the radical account. On this account, all bare plurals fail to express propositions. The content of a bare plural has to be pragmatically “completed” by a speaker in order for her to make an assertion. At least the content of a quantifier expression has to be supplied. But sometimes, the content of a sentential operator or modal verb is also supplied. The radical account straightforwardly explains the variety data: Speakers’ communicative intentions vary wildly across different contexts. The radical account should be taken seriously in the literature on generics.