Telic modality in Russian and beyond
Dmitry Privoznov
May 2019
 

The paper proposes a theory of actuality entailments built on two generalizations. The first generalization concerns the kind of root modals that give rise to actuality entailments. These modals have a specific flavor (accessibility relation). For them the prejacent should describe an event caused by the modal state and intended to happen by an implicit Agent. The second generalization concerns the contexts that trigger actuality entailments. Across various languages with different aspectual systems actuality entailing modals give rise to their actuality entailments only under perfective aspects. This makes them descriptively telic. The proposed analysis consists of three stipulations. Firstly, root modals return a predicate of events and describe various modal states. Secondly, root accessibility relations are relations between events (root modals quantify over possible events). Thirdly, one of these relations involves intentional causation. Root modals that take this relation quantify over the set of events that are caused by the modal state and are intended to happen by an implicit Agent. These modals are actuality entailing, that is, telic. For them the relation between the modal state and the prejacent is the same as the relation between the Mary-walking event and the Mary-being-at-Harvard event in the denotation of the telic verb phrase 'Mary walk to Harvard'.
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Reference: lingbuzz/005935
(please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords: modality, telicity, actuality entailments, semantics, morphology
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