Meaning Meeting - Paolo Santorio / Local contexts, pt. 1

Thursday September 28, Paolo Santorio leads the Meaning Meeting with a first course on 'local contexts', in the analysis of epistemic modality. Pre scriptum from p.s.: "This is the first of two sessions where I will discuss the interaction between modals and other operators. [Next week], I want to get to the interaction between tenses and root modals, in particular in X-marked constructions. This week, I will provide a primer about some of the tools that I'm going to use. I will present the notion of a local context as it is introduced and developed in the literature on presupposition, and then I will discuss the way Matt Mandelkern has used local contexts (or, well, something very much like local contexts) to predict a series of facts about epistemic modals, especially in his forthcoming book "Bounds". My discussion will not presuppose any previous knowledge of the material."