How do we capture the meaning of "may" or "can"? What kinds of linguistic math do we need to understand them? In this week's episode, we take a look at modality: where words like "must" fit in our meanings; how we consider many ways the world could be to account for their semantics; and how the same string of sounds can have a lot of flavours.
This is Topic #90!
This week's tag language: Cornish!
Related videos:
Logical Connections: How Logical Is Language? [ Ссылка ]
Let's Talk About Sets: How Do We Build Meaning with Math? [ Ссылка ]
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: What Does "Most" Even Mean? [ Ссылка ]
Last episode:
Relatively Close: How Can Sentences Work Like Adjectives? [ Ссылка ]
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Topic of Focus: How Do We Signal What's Important When We Talk? [ Ссылка ]
Downward Spiral: Why Can't "Any" Go Just Anywhere? [ Ссылка ]
Building Common Ground: How Do We Build Shared Worlds in Conversation? [ Ссылка ]
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on the syntax of modals, at: [ Ссылка ]
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Tumblr: [ Ссылка ]
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And at our website, [ Ссылка ] !
You can also find our store at the website, [ Ссылка ]
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
A good portion of the presentation was based off of Kai von Fintel's Intensional Semantics notes ([ Ссылка ])
We also consulted Angelika Kratzer's papers from 1977, 1981, and 1991, where all these ideas about modality originally come from:
The 1977 paper: [ Ссылка ]
The 1981 paper: [ Ссылка ]
The 1991 paper: [ Ссылка ]
For background -- historical and otherwise -- we consulted Basic Concepts in Modal Logic ([ Ссылка ]) and William Starr's lecture notes: ([ Ссылка ]).
Finally, we drew some inspiration from Seth Cable's recent (and wonderfully lucid) Formal Semantics notes: [ Ссылка ]
Looking forward to next time!
