Interpreting past epistemic modals in English, Dutch, and French
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.According to the standard view (Cinque 1999, Hacquard 2006, a.o.), epistemic modals in sentences such as “It had to be raining last night” always scope over past tense, expressing a present epistemic claim about a past event. However, this take has recently been disputed by several authors who argue that epistemics in fact can, or even must, scope under tense, which has substantial consequences for theories of modals (e.g. Rullmann & Matthewson 2018). As of now, research lacks a systematic empirical description of the crosslinguistic picture. The examples discussed in the literature vary widely between languages, and most of the data come from researchers’ own intuitions, fieldwork involving a limited number of informants, or informal questionnaires. The goal of this paper is, first, to settle the disagreement on the judgments, by comparing in a systematic and controlled way judgments in English, Dutch, and French; second, to assess the hypothesis from Van Dooren (2020b) that there is variation between languages, which can be explained by crosslinguistic differences in modals’ lexical status: auxiliaries versus verbs. We conducted two acceptability judgment experiments comparing past tensed modals like had to/moest/devait to the verbs seemed/leek/semblait in English, Dutch, and French using identical sentences and methods, and controlling for various factors overlooked in previous studies. Our results provide nuanced support for van Dooren’s hypothesis, and opens promising avenues for future research about modal temporal interaction.
Authors: Anouk Dieuleveut, Annemarie van Dooren
Institutions: University of Geneva, University of Groningen
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $551
OpenAlex ID: W7082286228