The non-modality of opinion verbs

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the interpretation of predicates of personal taste and epistemic modals. Specifically, I argue that while there are some interpretive similarities between the two, they do not warrant the unified treatment that they receive in Stephenson (2007) and others. I show that the relevant judge for predicates of personal taste and the relevant knower for epistemic modals can only be assigned by non-overlapping syntactic means. More specifically, epistemic verbs do not necessarily shift the judge of their embedded clause, and opinion verbs are not licensed by the presence of an epistemic modal in the complement, only by a true predicate of personal taste. I therefore argue that the interpretation of epistemic modals should not contain any reference to a judge index, and that judge dependency should not be accounted for using the mechanisms of modal semantics.