Abstract
We examine two phenomena which, with the exception of Bogal-Allbritten & Weir (2017), have not been systematically studied together but are clearly related: (a) epistemic adverbs in ad-nominal positions modifying a DP outside of coordination and (b) epistemic adverbs modifying a DP within a coordination of DPs (Collins conjunction). Ad-nominal adverbs outside of coordinate structures have been claimed to have a strong reading giving rise to an existential entailment ("John visited maybe England" entails that John visited some place, and that place might have been England) while in Collins conjunctions, a weak reading with no existential implication has been claimed to be available ("John and perhaps Mary went to the store" means that either John went to the store, or John and Mary went to the store). We provide corpus data which show that weak and strong readings are available both inside and outside coordination, and we provide a unified analysis of both phenomena based in event semantics which allows modal adverbs to have sub-sentential scope and still target expressions of propositional type. Our analysis relies on the flexible approach to semantic composition afforded by glue semantics (Dalrymple 1999; Gotham 2018), where a functor can ‘ignore’ unsaturated positions in its arguments.
Highlights
In this paper, we look at two phenomena which, with the exception of BogalAllbritten & Weir (2017), have not been systematically studied together but are Condoravdi, Dalrymple, Haug, and Przepiórkowski clearly related: epistemic adverbs in ad-nominal positions modifying a DP outside of coordination (1), and epistemic adverbs modifying a DP conjunct within a coordination of DPs (2)
Related to that is the question of whether Collins conjunctions are semantically ambiguous. If they are not ambiguous, but only have a weak reading, as many have argued, how does that square with the strong reading of ad-nominal modifiers outside of coordination? any theory of Collins conjunction must address the question of what and conjoins: is the coordination sub-clausal, or clausal with some sort of conjunction reduction?
Even if the semantics does not directly make available a strong reading for Collins conjunctions, the question arises why the presupposition of both cannot be accommodated in cases like (21b), with the speaker being understood as conveying uncertainty about the identity of the second individual
Summary
We look at two phenomena which, with the exception of BogalAllbritten & Weir (2017), have not been systematically studied together but are. Bogal-Allbritten (2013), argued that the existential implication of epistemic adverbs in ad-nominal positions is an entailment. Mary [VP possibly [VP ate the most expensive pizza in Amherst]] In addition to this entailment, there are pragmatic inferences associated with epistemic adverbs in ad-nominal positions. Taken together with the existential entailment associated with the ad-nominal position of the adverb, the speaker’s epistemic state is inferred to be partitioned into worlds in which John visited England and worlds in which John visited some place that was not England. Related to that is the question of whether Collins conjunctions are semantically ambiguous If they are not ambiguous, but only have a weak reading, as many have argued, how does that square with the strong reading of ad-nominal modifiers outside of coordination?
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