[GLLaM] Annemarie van Dooren & Anouk Dieuleveut - Past tense epistemics in English, French and Dutch
[GLLaM] Annemarie van Dooren & Anouk Dieuleveut - Past tense epistemics in English, French and Dutch
There is a debate in the literature about whether epistemic modals scope over (1i) or under (1ii) the tense of their own clause.
(1) It had to be raining last night.
i. 'Given the available evidence, it is necessarily the case that it was raining last night.' (necessary > past)
ii.'Given the available evidence, it was necessarily the case that it was raining last night.' (past >necessary)
We will be discussing the results of an acceptability judgment task on past tense epistemics in English, French, and Dutch (targeting had to, devait and moest) as recently, the standard view that epistemic modals scope over tense (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1975, Stowell 2004, Hacquard 2006, a.o.) has been disputed for all three languages (Rullmann & Matthewson 2018, Martin 2009, a.o.). We ran an acceptability judgment task in which we compare epistemic modals to epistemic verbs like seemed, which scope under tense. We find a difference between epistemic modals and epistemic verbs in all three languages; we furthermore find a difference between Dutch on the one hand and French and English on the other hand. The goal of this talk is to further discuss our findings and brainstorm about potential follow-ups.