Roberts on epistemic modals in Linguistics Colloquium Friday 3:30

Craige Roberts of the Ohio State University and New York University will be presenting “Agreeing and Assessing: Epistemic modals and the question under discussion” in the Linguistics colloquium series Friday March 3rd at 3:30, in ILC N400. All are welcome!

Abstract. Important debates in the recent literature on Epistemic Modal Auxiliaries (EMAs) hinge on how we understand disagreements about the truth of assertions containing EMAs, and on a variety of attested response patterns to such assertions. Some relevant examples display evidence of faultless disagreement (Lasersohn 2005; Egan et al. 2005; MacFarlane 2005, 2011; Egan 2007; Stephenson 2007) or “faulty agreement” (Moltmann 2002). Others display a variety of patterns of felicitous response to statements with EMAs, responses which sometimes seem to target the prejacent alone and other times the entire modal claim (Lyons 1977; Swanson 2006; Stephenson 2007; von Fintel & Gillies 2007b,2008; Portner 2009; Dowell 2011; among others). I provide an alternative characterization of what it is to agree about EMA statements, arguing that this has generally been misunderstood. Then I provide evidence that the pattern of felicitous response to a given example is a function of the question under discussion in the context of utterance, undercutting a variety of criticisms of the standard semantics which trade on these phenomena.