Many analyses place epistemics at a different LF position than (some) other modals. But at closer examination, none of the current proposals is entirely convincing. Here we consider two of the better attempts to prove such a structural difference, by [Brennan, 1993] and [Hacquard, 2006].
It is well-known that deontics may concern obligations/permissions personally concerning the subject of the clause (sometimes called “ought-to-do” deontics), or those that are just declared to hold, without naming a specific agent responsible to uphold them (“ought-to-be” deontics). [Brennan, 1993] argues that epistemics occupy a higher (logical/semantic) position than ought-to-do (=subject-associated) deontics. Her argument is based on their interaction with symmetric predicates such asshake hands with orbe in the same room as.
For a symmetric R, R(a)(b) by definition has the same truth value as R(b)(a). Brennan notes that under the epistemic reading of may, 50 and 51 entail each other, but argues that under the deontic reading, 50 may fail to entail 51. Thus for epistemics, we have Ep(R(a)(b))⇔Ep(R(a)(b)), as we expect givenR(a)(b)⇔R(a)(b). But under the deontic reading ofmay, Brennan argues, 50 may be true while 51 is false. Brennan concludes that the logical form must be [Deo(R(obj))](subj) rather than Deo(R(obj)(subj)), for from the latter we’d automatically derive Deo(R(subj)(obj)) which she wants to exclude. She concludes that some deontics should be able to scope lower than epistemics, interfering between the subject and the predicate to destroy symmetry.
(50) The governor may shake hands with all the prisoners. [Brennan, 1993, (37a)]
(51) All the prisoners may shake hands with the governor. [Brennan, 1993, (37b)]
Brennan’s account for the deontic case where entailment fails is as follows ([Brennan, 1993, Ch. 2.2.2-3]). She proposes that the modal in such cases scopes below the subject, and that the accessibility relation is relativized to the subject, and defined in terms of properties.
Schematically, here is what she proposes for 50:
(52) • For a property-background Phes,ti,w0 is accessible from w for individual diff hw0, di ∈P
• Deogov is a property-background containing all properties deontically accessi-ble to the governor. Deoprisis, correspondingly, a similar property-background for a prisoner.
• Deogov may differ from Deopris: the governor may have more rights than a prisoner.
• Under-the-subject deonticmay uses property-backgroundDeod for subjectd.
• In effect, may uses Deogov in 50, but Deopris in 51, and in case Deopris is more restrictive, 50 can be true despite 51 being false.
What is crucial in this setup is not the notion of a property-background as such (though it plays an important role when Brennan provides an intuitive justification for her system), but the fact that 50 and 51 employ different conversational backgrounds. However, as long as we allow the backgrounds between the two differ, we can derive the failure of entailment between the two sentences even in the classical Kratzerian system. Suppose that our background for 50 consists of the rules regulating the governor’s behavior, and that for 50, of the rules for prisoners. Our sentences would then become largely synonymous with 53-54. It is clear that 53 and 54 do not entail each other: after all, the relevant sets of rules may even contradict each other. But then we do not expect 50 and 51 to entail one another either. In other words, we do not really need the backgrounds to be syntactically relativized to the subject: it suffices to have two different backgrounds for the entailment to fail.7
(53) According to the rules regulating the governor’s behavior, the governor may shake hands with all the prisoners.
(54) According to the rules regulating the prisoners’ behavior, all the prisoners may shake hands with the governor.
Thus Brennan’s data do not justify the low position for ought-to-do deontics. At the same time, her data do not show that epistemics absolutely cannot scope below the subject:
she only demonstrates they do not need to. In fact, as we discussed above in Sec. 3.2, sometimes epistemics do scope below the subject of their clause. We can only conclude that no clear generalization regarding the position of epistemics vs. ought-to-do deontics emerges.
7There is also a second explanation of the pattern observed by Brennan, which, if true, also invalidates her structural conclusion. When speakers start explicating why they may judge 50 true, but 51 false, they often argue that the sentence’s subject feels a more active party. Brennan herself writes: “[50] and [51]
may not be exactly equivalent; the subject seems to have a more agentive role than the object in the handshaking” ([Brennan, 1993, p. 89]). In other words, speakers may take 50 to mean something like 1.
Crucially, the predicate on such a reading is not symmetric, therefore Brennan’s argument does not apply.
(1) The governor mayinitiate the shaking of handswith all the prisoners.
Another attempt to show that epistemics and to-be deontics are higher than ought-to-do deontics is due to [Hacquard, 2006], [Hacquard, 2009], [Hacquard, 2010]. Her argu-ment is based on so-called actuality entailargu-ments: an effect that arises for many modals in perfective clauses when the modal’s argument proposition is entailed to hold in the actual world. For instance,I was-perfective able to close the door would entail that I actually closed the door.
Hacquard observes that in French, only epistemics and ought-to-be deontics are spared the actuality entailment. She argues that this is due to those modals occupying a different structural position from all the rest. This structural conclusion thus depends on the success of her account of actuality entailments as a whole, so we need to briefly review it.
Modals in Hacquard’s analysis introduce an event variable which determines the modal base — in contrast to the standard Kratzerian semantics where the modal base is directly supplied by the context. The event variable in the modal must be bound by the closest suitable binder up the tree. For modals below aspect, this binder is introduced by aspect.
For modals above aspect in a matrix clause, it is the speech-act event. The analysis of actuality entailments thus has two parts: one predicts that below-aspect modals give rise to actuality entailments, while the other explains why above-aspect modals don’t. When that analysis is combined with Hacquard’s empirical observation about which particular modals trigger actuality entailments, we derive that epistemics and ought-to-be deontics scope above aspect, while other modals scope below it.
Unfortunately, there are problems with both below-aspect and above-aspect parts of the account. It is open at the moment whether they can be resolved, and there is no obviously better account of actuality entailments than Hacquard’s. But those problems make the conclusion about the relative position of epistemics uncertain. The below-aspect problems are reviewed in [Portner, 2009, Ch. 4.4], to which the reader is referred. The above-aspect problems have to do with the derivation of a proper modal base for epistemics and ought-to-be deontics from a speech-act event, and we will discuss them here.
Hacquard argues that the epistemic modal base equals thecontent of the speech-act event, where itscontentis defined as the beliefs of the speaker (NB: not as the asserted proposition, which could be informally called the content of a speech act; to highlight this, I hereby italicizecontent in Hacquard’s sense). Thusmight(p) asserts thatpis compatible with the speaker’s beliefs. As we know from Sec. 2, tying matrix epistemic modality personally to the speaker is a very problematic move. It is not very clear how Hacquard’s definition of the content of the speech-act event can be modified to derive more adequate predictions about the epistemic modal base in matrix contexts.
With ought-to-be deontics, things get even hairier. Hacquard argues that ought-to-be deontics deontic(p) are always performative, and put the obligation to make p true onto the addressee. She argues that as performatives, declarative ought-to-be matrix statements
belong to the Imperative, and not Declarative, speech-act type. She proposes that for an Imperative, the content of the speech-act event is the addressee’s To-Do List.8 But there are a number of problems with this proposal. First, many ought-to-be deontics are not performative. 55 is obligatorily ought-to-be because it has an inanimate subject, which cannot personally bear any obligation. At the same time, the speaker of 55 is most likely describing an existing requirement rather than performatively adding a new one.
(55) Taxes have to be filed by mid-April.
If some ought-to-be deontics are non-performative, they, according to Hacquard’s proposal, belong to the Declarative speech-act type. Thecontent of the speech-act event of that type is the speaker’s beliefs. Thus 55 on the deontic reading is predicted to be synonymous with the epistemic reading of the same sentence, which is clearly a wrong result.
Second, even for performative ought-to-be deontics there is a problem: Hacquard’s seman-tics predicts that such necessity deonseman-tics are synonymous with imperatives. So 56a said to Kitty’s babysitter should be exactly synonymous with 56b, but it is not obvious that it is.
(56) a. Kitty must do her homework tonight.
b. Make it so that Kitty does her homework tonight.
So both the below-aspect and the above-aspect parts of Hacquard’s account are not without problems. Her conclusion that epistemics are higher than roots relies on that account. The conclusion therefore cannot be accepted at this time. In other words, we still do not have solid evidence that epistemics occur in a different position from (some) other modals.
4 Embedding epistemics under attitudes
Examples 57-60 show that epistemics are embeddable under a wide range of attitude pred-icates.9
(57) [Papafragou, 2006, (38a)]:
It issurprising that the victimmusthave known the killer.
8[Hacquard, 2006] relies on [Ninan, 2005]’s modification of [Portner, 2005]’s theory of imperatives. Port-ner’s To-Do Lists contain properties, while Ninan’s and Hacquard’s contain propositions.
9Note that care needs to be applied when considering such examples: as most modals are multiply ambiguous, it is important to make sure the example is good under the epistemic reading. Simple gram-maticality of a written string is not enough to show that. Though this point was already made in Sec. 1.2, for embedded examples it is worth reiterating, as in them the issue arises particularly often.
(58) [Stephenson, 2007, (5b)]:
[Every contestant]i thinkstheyi mightbe the winner.
(59) [Anand and Hacquard, 2009, p. 42]:
John is happythat the Earth mightbe flat.
(60) [Yanovich, 2014, (65)]:
Sarah is wonderingwhether Bill mightbe in Boston.
But there are two further questions. First, what do such embedded epistemics mean?
Second, are there constraints on embedding, or is it completely free?
On the first question, there are two main camps. Many propose that under an attitude, the epistemic modal base is derived relative to the attitude’s subject ([Stephenson, 2007], [Hacquard, 2010], [Yalcin, 2007], [Anand and Hacquard, 2013]). Some others argue that even under attitudes, the modal base is determined by the matrix context ([Dowell, 2011], [Yanovich, 2014]).
The position that the epistemic modal base becomes dependent on the attitude’s subject is intuitively appealing because in examples like 58, “the embedded modal seems to express [the contestants’] mental state[s]” ([Stephenson, 2007, p. 489]). But as [Yanovich, 2014, Sec. 3.1] notes, even when the matrix context cdetermines how the modal base should be defined in principle, the base’s extent also depends on the local evaluation world, namely the doxastic alternative w0 of some contestant. So even on an analysis from the second camp, we expect 58 to be about the contestants’ minds.
Another intuition behind the first camp’s position is that sentences like 61 do not seem to involve two layers of quantification over worlds: “Does [61] mean, as a relational semantics requires, that Fido believes that it is compatible with what Fido believes that there is an intruder downstairs? That is not plausible. Surely the truth of [61] does not turn on recherch´e facts about canine self-awareness.” ([Yalcin, 2007, p. 997])
(61) Fido thinks there might be an intruder downstairs.
This, however, is based on a misunderstanding. Whether we attribute a belief to dog Fido or human Jill, we cannot observe what they really think. Instead, we observe their behavior, and then try to make sense of it by forming a hypothesis about their mental state. Crucially, they need not be able to reflexively formulate that hypothesis themselves.
For example, I may observe Jill slipping into sleep while still sitting in the armchair, and say “Jill thinks it’s time to go to bed”. This can be a fine attribution even if Jill is so tired that she cannot produce any sentence anymore.
So intuitions do not help much, and what this boils down to is the presence of readings that one of the two theories cannot derive. Unfortunately, there exists a problematic type of examples for either camp.
For the second camp, where the matrix context determines the modal base, the problem is the examples where the relevant knowledge seems to be very far removed from the present conversation, and thus the matrix context. On a straightforward analysis, what is relevant knowledge for me and you when I say to you 62, would be very different from the knowledge relevant for Ann back then.
(62) Back then, Ann thought that Jill might be in Boston.
[Dowell, 2011] argues that what such cases involve is a parasitic pickup of the attitude subject’s situation, in the same manner as context-dependent items like nearby can be parasitic on the attitude subject when embedded. [Yanovich, 2014] argues that in such cases, we “import” the attitude subject’s problem into our own context. It is not fully clear at the moment just how feasible such theoretical moves are.
For the first camp, the most problematic cases are those where talking about the attitude subject’s state of mind seems to lead to nonsensical results. For instance, in 60 above Sarah is hardly concerned with her own state of mind. Similarly in 63, Jan is clearly not concerned with her own thoughts, as she knows the treasure isnot in the garden. The first camp might be able to produce an explanation for such cases, but hasn’t. For instance, [Stephenson, 2007, p. 507-8], not aware of cases like 63, argues it’s a welcome prediction of her account that they are declared impossible.
(63) Context: the kids are looking for the treasure that the adults, including Jan, have hid in the attic.
Well, Jan knows the children well and she thinks that if the treasure might be in the garden, they’ll check there.
Intended meaning: “Jan thinks that if the treasure being in the garden is among the children’s epistemic possibilities, they will check there”.
Turning to the second open question, are there constraints on which attitudes can embed epistemics? There is a range of such constraints proposed in the literature: [Yalcin, 2007]
arguesmight(p)∧ ¬p cannot occur under suppose and if (we discussed the suppose case above in Section 2.1.4). [Schnieder, 2010] and [Crabill, 2013] argue that might(p) cannot appear in such contexts at all. However, [Yanovich, 2014] argues such examples are actually
possible (again, see Section 2.1.2). [Hacquard and Wellwood, 2012] and [Anand and Hacquard, 2013]
argue that possibility, but not necessity epistemics are OK underhope and fear.
It can be concluded from this body of literature that some attitudes really dislike em-bedding an epistemic in actual practice (see especially [Hacquard and Wellwood, 2012], [Anand and Hacquard, 2013], [Yanovich, 2014, p. 110]). What remains unclear so far is what causes that dislike: is it semantic ill-formedness, pragmatic weirdness, or perhaps
an arbitrary, language-specific grammatical constraint? With more data, especially from languages different from English, we may hope to eventually answer that question.
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