Anouk in Journal of Semantics

Why can Sam see Saturn when she can see Saturn?

Oh say! The Journal of Semantics just published "Can you See? Actuality Entailments in the Present," from alum Anouk Dieuleveut *21, presently on a postdoc in Geneva, who began this paper while still at Maryland, with the advising of Valentine and Alexander. The paper is about the fact that "Sam can see Saturn" has a use which entails that she is seeing Saturn, which "Sam can watch Saturn" does not. Anouk proposes to analyze this an actuality entailment, just like "This morning I was able to finish my grading," triggered by covert perfective aspect. Ordinarily perfective is unavailable in the present tense, across diverse languages, but verbs of involuntary perception, such as see, are a principled exception. The full abstract is below.

Can you See? Actuality Entailments in the Present

This paper argues that English present ability modal statements like “I can see Saturn” are ambiguous in the same way as past ability statements like “I was able to lift a fridge”: they can express either a general ability (‘I have the ability to see Saturn, in general’), or have an actualized (episodic) interpretation (‘I'm seeing Saturn, right now’). The challenge is to explain why in the present, actualized interpretations are only licensed when the modal's prejacent is a perception verb like see, and not with other predicates: “I can watch Saturn” only has the general ability reading available, and not the actualized one. I propose that (i) similar to what has been shown for past modal statements in the literature on Actuality Entailments (AEs) (Bhatt 1999), the ambiguity depends on grammatical aspect: general ability readings are due to the imperfective, which “removes” AEs by having the event occur in worlds introduced by a generic operator (Bhatt 1999), and actualized readings are due to the perfective, which directly combines with the prejacent event across the modal (Hacquard 2009); (ii) The usual unavailability of actualized interpretations in the present comes from the Present Perfective Paradox (Malchukov 2009): perfective aspect is incompatible with present tense, because the event time, a time interval, cannot be contained within the punctual speech time. (iii) Perception verbs are special in that they, and only they, are able to combine with perfective in the present, either because the PPP does not arise at all, or because they allow a specific type of aspectual coercion. This also explains their behavior in (non-modal) simple present sentences. A second challenge is that actualized interpretations in the present appear to occur exclusively with ability modals, and not when modals express other root flavors (e.g. teleological or deontic). I propose that this restriction is due to a further temporal orientation constraint.