On December 17th, Enrico Flor brilliantly and successfully defended his dissertation entitled Coarse Modality!
The dissertation documents the existence of what Enrico calls “coarse modality”, drawing mostly on Italian data. Much of the focus is on reducing apparent polysemy to an underspecified meaning that interacts with other modal expressions. The central theoretical argument of the dissertation is that an insightful and natural analysis of coarse modality across speech acts relies on a novel use of certain peculiar and somewhat underutilized properties of Kratzer’s premise semantics for modals.
Here is Enrico with three members of his committee (l to r: Martin Hackl, Sabine Iatridou, Enrico Flor, Kai von Fintel). The fourth member, Viola Schmitt, participated remotely.
Congratulations, Enrico!!
