top of page

Can in L&P

My "Two Puzzles about Ability Can" is now forthcoming in Linguistics & Philosophy (doi: 10.1007/s10988-020-09296-6). Here is the abstract:

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.

Recent Posts

See All

My contribution to a book symposium on Una Stojnić's recent Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence has now appeared in Inquiry (here).

My review of Fabrizio Cariani's recent The Modal Future has now appeared in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-modal-future-a-theory-of-future-directed-thought-and-talk/

My joint paper with Chris Kennedy on how the notion of counterstance contingency can help make us sense of subjectivity in language is now forthcoming in Linguistics and Philosophy---check it our here

bottom of page