Meaning Meeting - Elizabeth Swanson / The temporal orientation of attitude verbs
Meaning Meeting - Elizabeth Swanson / The temporal orientation of attitude verbs
October 2, Elizabeth leads the Meaning Meeting with discussion her work on the temporal orientation of attitude verbs and its acquisition. What do we think and when do we want it? Elizabeth's abstract is below.
Growing out of ongoing acquisition work, my presentation will focus on possible restrictions on the temporal orientation of modals and attitude verbs. Specifically, root modals and preferential attitudes are typically future-oriented (e.g., I want to eat ice cream; You must go to school), while epistemic modals and representational attitudes are more flexible in temporal orientation (e.g., She must be in her office – present; I think she was in her office – past). This contrast is often captured with a version of Condoravdi’s (2002) Diversity Condition, which derives the generalization that root modals should be future-oriented (Condoravdi, 2002; Rullmann & Matthewson, 2017; Thomas, 2014, 2017) and can be extended to attitudes as well (Klecha, 2016). I will examine data that appear to make up exceptions to the generalization, and then speculate on possible amendments or alternatives to the DC that can account for the data.