Speaker: Shrayana Haldar (MIT)
Title: Modal Debris: Threefold Ambiguities between Permission, Weak Necessity, and Strong Necessity in Bengali
Time: Wednesday, November 22nd, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: The usual way to characterize the Bengali copular modal hoy is to say it’s the strong necessity modal of the language. I will show that hoy is ambiguous between strong necessity and weak necessity in upward-entailing contexts, permission and strong necessity under negation, and permission, weak, and strong necessity in polar questions. Following Staniszewski (2022) I will show why a scopal account, varying the attachment heights of negation and the modal, doesn’t work, using diagnostics involving the presuppositions of no longer and only. The account I will propose instead will involve pursuing the lines pursued by Staniszewski (2022), who derived weak necessity from strong necessity by (i) putting an existential quantifier over ordering source sequences on the strong necessity modal, (ii) exhaustifying this structure with existential force into an meaning of weak universal force by innocently including relevant subdomain alternatives and pruning the irrelevant ones (Bar-Lev 2018). The threefold ambiguity in polar questions will be accounted for, again following Staniszewski (2022), by making a silent even operator interact with the scope of whether (Guerzoni 2004). Time permitting, I will discuss some questions it raises about restrictions on forming Katzirian (Katzir 2007, Fox and Katzir 2011) deletion alternatives, a constraint I have been thinking about for the past few weeks, how I think it works better than Meyer’s (2013) restriction on deleting covert material, and also does away with the need of the Atomicity+ constraint developed in Trinh (2018).