Abstract
This paper deals with a different behavior of weak necessity modals (in Japanese, hazu) in comparison with plain necessity or possibility modals in their epistemic use. While the latter cannot be immediately followed by the negation of its prejacent, the former allows this. After reviewing some previous approaches to this fact in Kratzerian framework, we try to implement [14]’s insight in terms of an update semantics by [15], modified by [13]. We propose that hazu makes a (possibly) counterfactual update by revising CG with normalcy condition.
We would like to thank Yusuke Kubota, Takumi Tagawa, Misato Ido, Katsumasa Ito, Hitomi Hirayama, Chunhong Park, Saori Takayanagi, Akitaka Yamada and three anonymous reviewers and participants of LENLS 11 for their insightful comments and discussions. This work was supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows Grant Number 25-9444.
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Notes
- 1.
Abbreviations used in this paper are as follows: Conj = conjunction, Cop = copula, Loc = locative, Neg = negation, Nom = nominative, Pres = present, Result = resultative, Top = topic.
- 2.
We will often refer to the large intersection of a modal base, that is, a set of worlds in which all the propositions in the modal base hold, as a modal base, when there is no chance of misunderstanding.
- 3.
In this paper, we will make the Limit Assumption ([9]) for simplicity’s sake because nothing hinges on the assumption.
- 4.
- 5.
This might not be a valid counterargument when one takes [10]’s strong view that all epistemic modals contribute their own evidential semantics (and all evidentials contribute modal semantics) and follows her in regarding the direct perceptual evidence and the general knowledge as forming a natural class based on “trustworthiness”.
- 6.
- 7.
See [14] for arguments for this difference in presupposition.
- 8.
\(Best_{g(w)} (\cap f(w)) = \{w\,|\,w \in \cap f(w) \wedge \forall w' \in \cap f(w) [w' \le _{g(w)}w \rightarrow w \le _{g(w)}w']\}\) where \(w \le _{g(w)}w'\) iff \(\forall p \in g(w)[w' \in p \rightarrow w \in p]\).
- 9.
As the formalization below shows, the “retraction” doesn’t occur when there is no abnormalcy in CG to be retracted. In that case, hazu comes close to an ordinary necessity modal without a “subjunctive” (counterfactual) flavor.
- 10.
The condition of mutual acceptance is our original proposal, interpreting Schulz’s belief state as representing common ground.
- 11.
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Okano, S., Mori, Y. (2015). On CG Management of Japanese Weak Necessity Modal Hazu . In: Murata, T., Mineshima, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9067. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48119-6_12
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