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Title:
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Modality and the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface
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Author:
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Anna Papafragou
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~anna4
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Degree Awarded:
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University College London
, PhD in Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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1998
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Pragmatics
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Subject Language(s):
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English
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Director(s):
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Deirdre Wilson
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Abstract:
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The thesis explores certain aspects of the structure of lexical semantics and its interaction with pragmatic processes of utterance comprehension using the English modal verbs as a case study. Contrary to previous polysemy-based accounts, I propose and defend a unitary semantic account of the English modals and give a relevance-theoretic explanation of the construction of their admissible (mainly, root and epistemic) contextual interpretations. I propose an original link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation and treat the acquisition of epistemic modal markers as a result of the development of the human theory of mind.
In support of my central contention that the English modals are semantically univocal, I reanalyse a range of arguments employed by previous polysemy-based approaches. These arguments involve the distributional properties of the modals, their relationship to truth-conditional content, the status of so-called speech-act modality and the historical development of epistemic meanings. It turns out that none of these arguments can offer reasons to abandon the univocal semantic analysis of the English modals. Furthermore, I argue that the priority of root over epistemic meanings in language acquisition is predicted by the link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation. Finally, data from a cognitive disorder, autism, are considered in the light of the metarepresentation hypothesis for epistemic modality.
The discussion of modality has a number of implications for the concept of polysemy. I suggest that, despite its widespread use in current lexical semantics, polysemy is not a natural class; moreover, it is often the case that polysemy analyses presuppose some questionable assumptions about the structure of lexical concepts. I propose a division of labour between ambiguity, semantic underdeterminacy and a narrowed version of polysemy, and present its ramifications for the psychology of word meaning. In the final chapter, I extend the proposed framework for modality to the analysis of generic sentences, thereby capturing certain similarities between genericity and modality.
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