Search Results for natural language modality

.... I also assumed that the relevant state quantifier is bare. 52. There is considerable disagreement whether modality and tense are to be rep- resented as quantifiers or operators at the level of logical form. Since it is not clear that natural languages have genuine variable-binding (see n. 3...

... in the model theory of first-order logic. In (4) above ‘he’ is bound but ‘him’ is free. It is a fairly orthodox view that modals in natural language are unselective operators that shift the world of evaluation for entire sentences in their scope. This view can be stated more precisely as the conjunction...

... and not p⌝ and ⌜Not p and might p⌝ are inconsistent? To make sense of this situation, I propose a new theory of epistemic modals that aims to account for their subtle embedding behavior and shed new light on the dynamics of information in natural language. 40. See Beaver 1994 , Groenendijk, Stokhof...

... for consistency. The appropriate starting point for our investigation turns out to be with an examination of the notion of logical possibility : a modality that, putting it informally, stands to reality as logical consistency stands to language. This is introduced and developed in sections 1 and 2. We begin our...

... natural language modality semantics pragmatics Ability modals are modals like those used in (1), (2), and (3): modals that can be paraphrased with the dedicated ability constructions ‘able’ or ‘has the ability/capacity’. (1) John can go swimming this evening. (2) Mary can touch her nose...

...: no matter what language L we may be speaking, it is possible for us to expand L to L + so that there is a set, in our new sense, of everything in the range of L 's quantifiers. As the wording just used suggests, the natural statement of this is as a modal claim (the modal analogy will be pursued...

... and Language , ed. J. E. Tomberlin. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview. ____. 2007 . “Introduction.” Dialectica 61 : 1 . Forbes, Graeme. 1987 . “Review of Alvin Plantinga: A Profile.” Noûs 21 : 60 -66. ____. 1989 . Languages of Possibility . Oxford: Blackwell. Hodes, Harold. 1984 . “On Modal...

... of a principle of extensionality for sets and two highly natural principles governing the relationship between modal operators and set formation. Standard claims of (extensional) set theory can be read as implicitly modalized, by prefixing any universal quantifier by □ and any existential quantifier and atomic...

.... Sellars thought of himself as a Humean about modality, too, in some respects. In “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities” ( 1958 ) he endorses the “core truth” of what he takes to be a Humean empiricist view of both normative and causal language: that it is simply not in the same line...

... . “ Future and Non-future Modal Sentences .” Natural Language Semantics 14 , no. 3 : 235 – 55 . Williamson Timothy . 2006 . “ Indicative versus Subjunctive Conditionals, Congruential versus Non-hyperintensional Contexts .” Philosophical Issues 16 , no. 1 : 310 – 33 . Yalcin Seth...

... drops the commitment to modes of presentation in favor of the idea that know-how reports exploit a special flavor of modality, which is slightly different from that of the overt modal can . (For the claim that know-how reports in natural language involve modality, see the appendix.) Thus, when Sam...

... formal “possible worlds” of the standard Kripke-models.) What does the relativized notion of truth in an interpretation studied in (non- modal) model theory have to do with plain old truth? Chihara’s answer involves “connecting theorems” that relate truth-in to truth (chapter 5). A “natural-lan...

... Modalities and Relative Truth.” httpsocrates.berkeley.edu/∼jmacf/epistmod.pdf. Simons, Mandy. 2005. “Dividing Things Up: The Semantics of Or and the Modal/Or Interaction.” Natural Language Semantics 13: 271–316. Stephenson, Tamina. Forthcoming. “Judge Dependence, Epistemic Modals...

... to perception in which vision goes proxy for other individual sensory modalities and for perception as a whole. Dubbed ‘the tyranny of the visual,’ this approach leads to: (1) obscuring the essentially temporal nature of auditory objects, (2) viewing perceptual experience as little more than the sum of unimodal...

... to a propositional or first- order language. The field owes much of its flavor and success to the intro- duction in the 1950s of the “possible-worlds” semantics in which the modal operators are interpreted via some “accessibility relation” connecting pos- sible worlds. In subsequent years, modal logic has...

... . “ An Opinionated Guide to Epistemic Modality .” In Oxford Studies in Epistemology 2 , ed. Gendler Tamar Hawthorne John , 32 – 62 . New York : Oxford University Press . ———. 2010 . “ Must ... Stay ... Strong .” Natural Language Semantics 18 ( 4 ): 351 – 83 . doi:10.1007/s11050-010-9058-2...

... that semantics is, it can be stated within our broad framework. So the assumptions needed to establish the validity of our two inferences all concern the workings of the nonmodal fragment of the language. Thus, our setup is compatible with a wide range of approaches to the semantics of epistemic modals...

..., it seems that one would have to assume that the names in (4) and (5) are not rigid. However, since propositional attitude verbs are arguably some of the most semantically complex expressions in natural language, proponents of millianism might be inclined to think that cases such as (4) and (5...

... by the factalist paraphrase of L . The other strategy implements a two-staged reduction of ordinary modal talk to factalist amodal talk. In the first stage, ordinary object-and-quality language is paraphrased into a sparse object-and-quality language, wherein any two atomic sentences are modally independent...

... equivalent to φ . (This equivalence is broken in various embedded contexts, such as conditionals, which add further information to input proposition for the selection function.) We get a nice account of the dilemma: “will” is indeed a modal, but its true modal nature is hidden in simple, unembedded claims...