NASSLLI 2022

Futurity, evidentiality, and modality: Cross-disciplinary perspectives

(w/ Fabrizio Cariani)

Our goal in this class is to explore the connections between modality, evidentiality and futurist reference by bringing together often disconnected strands of research from philosophy and linguistics, focusing especially on recent work in philosophy of language, formal semantics and formal pragmatics. Modal displacement—the ability to talk about how things could or must be—is a fundamental property of human language, and there is a host of approaches to the semantics, pragmatics and epistemology of modal claims. However, what constitutes modality is still an open question, both empirically and conceptually. We will address it by taking a close look at two phenomena that have been argued to be of modal nature: (1) evidentiality, a category that deals with an information source for an utterance, and (2) future reference and associated categories that deal with events that are yet to happen. We will discuss the distinction between direct and indirect evidence and how such distinctions are reflected in language, in particular, evidential restrictions on modal claims and evidential constraints on future-directed discourse. The class is structured as follows. Day 1 is a primer on mainstream theories of modality. Day 2 covers a variety of puzzles about the nature of evidence, modality and assertion. Day 3 is about evidence in language and assertions with evidentials. Day 4 is entirely devoted to the future. Day 5 talks about the Acquaintance Inference, a phenomenon whereby we call something “tasty” only if we have tried it, and conditions when this inference goes away.

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