Abstract
In this paper, we study the distribution and interpretation of a non-temporal use of the future tense in Italian, called ‘presumptive’ or ‘epistemic’, which we label here PF. We first distinguish PF from its closest modal relatives, namely epistemic necessity/possibility/likelihood modals, as well as weak necessity modals. We then propose an account of PF in declaratives and interrogatives that treats it as a special comparative subjective likelihood modal, and test its empirical predictions. A theoretical lesson drawn from this detailed study of the semantics of PF is that semantics needs sharpened theoretical tools to be able to capture the fine-grained distinctions languages make when it comes to signaling modulated epistemic commitment to a proposition.
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Notes
Verbs in Italian have (i) a synthetic future that has a temporal future reading (the futuro semplice), and (ii) a periphrastic future form (the futuro anteriore), constructed with the future of the auxiliary essere ‘to be’ or avere, ‘to have’, followed by the past participle of the verb. (The auxiliary is selected by the verb for reasons that are entirely independent of the issues this paper is concerned with.) The temporal interpretation of the latter is the ‘past in the future’ interpretation, as in Alle sette avremo già mangiato ‘By 7 we will have already eaten’; the non-temporal interpretation is the PF interpretation and it is the focus of this paper. The PF interpretation becomes the only available interpretation when the future (whether future semplice or futuro anteriore) co-occurs with a non-future temporal adverb. We translate PF into English sometimes by epistemic might or must, sometimes by the adverb presumably, and sometimes by the modal would, depending on what best captures our intuition concerning its contribution. As we will see below, none of these translations captures the meaning of PF in all the cases we consider here. All instances of non-temporal future forms in the paper have been boldfaced for ease of reference.
We will use the following abbreviations: 1 = first person, 2 = second person, 3= third person, m = masculine, f = feminine, sg = singular, pl = plural, fut = future, pst = past, prs = present, pp = past participle, ger = gerund, inf = infinitive, cond = conditional, subj = subjunctive, impf = imperfect tense, imp = imperative.
Concerning the Italian data, unless indicated otherwise, the examples provided in the paper have been constructed by the authors. The judgments we report reflect the judgments of ten native speakers of Italian, all from Northern Italy.
We assume, following Mari (2012), that the presumptive future reading is also available in sentences in which the future tense receives a future temporal interpretation, but will not argue this point here.
While a reviewer found infelicitous, the judgments we collected were clear: on a scale of acceptability from 1 to 7 (with 1 being the worst and 7 being the best), seven out of the ten native speakers of Italian we consulted gave a score of 7, and the remaining three gave it a score of 5 or higher.
A reviewer raises the possibility that the difference between PF and must/dovere is that, while the latter requires a salient argument (cf. Mandelkern 2018), PF is ruled out in contexts where a salient argument is given. The felicity of examples like (i) show that PF is acceptable in contexts where an argument for the assertability of the PF sentence is given.
For discussion of this morphological pattern cross-linguistically, see von Fintel and Iatridou (2008).
We are grateful to a reviewer for this example.
The presence of the question mark for dovrebbe in ignorance signals our uncertainty concerning the judgment in this case. A large scale collection of data is needed before one can reach robust generalizations concerning this modal in Italian. Since we are interested only in distinguishing PF from dovrebbe, which can be established on the basis of (20) and (21) above, the issue of the semantics of dovrebbe is beyond the scope of this paper. For relevant discussion, see Cariani (2013) and Yalcin (2016).
The notion of (un)settledness relevant here is the same as the subjective non-veridicality condition in Giannakidou and Mari (2017). While our account shares the notion of unsettledness with the proposal in Giannakidou and Mari (2017), it crucially differs from it in that it relies on subjective likelihood rather than universal quantification, and it distinguishes epistemic from doxastic bases. In the present account, the fact that p is not settled as far as the doxastic state of the evaluating agent is concerned is an implicature that the semantics of PF gives rise to. Note also that Farkas (2003) uses the notion of settledness, under a different name, in connection with mood distribution.
We are not claiming that there always is a one-to-one map** between prosodic focus and semantic focus: if the former underdetermines the latter, then we assume that the hearer will accommodate the focus structure and presupposition that allows the PF-sentence to be congruent to the qud.
Note that wide focus in Bea’s utterance is required in order to make her answer congruent to Aldo’s question. Narrow focus on any subcontituent in this utterance—for example, focus on the predicate malata only—would generate a set of alternatives of the form ‘Bea is P’ of which the question would not be a subset, thus violating the congruence requirement between questions and answers.
We thank Ashwini Deo and an anonymous reviewer for leading us to think about these examples.
In (i), we see that it is odd for a speaker to raise one possibility with the epistemic modal potrebbe and another using PF:
We do not have an explanation for this fact except to suggest that it is a pragmatically odd move to draw attention to one possibility only to discard it immediately after and draw attention to another. Indeed, the sentence improves if the speaker has a reason to consider the Carlo alternative while believing that the Ezio alternative is the most likely:
The judgments of our consultants varied in the doctor scenario. Six out of ten speakers rated this sentence < 5 (again, on a 1–7 scale), two speakers gave the sentence a 5, and the remaining two speakers gave the sentence a 6. Given that in our account the oddness of this example is rooted in expectations about what a doctor would say to a patient, this variation is not entirely unexpected.
In addition, we noted above that the math scenario also violates the npi.
Contrastive focus on the necessity modal deve is required in this situation.
We thank Ashwini Deo and an anonymous reviewer for pushing us to clarify the fact that a comparative notion of subjective likelihood is needed rather than an absolute one.
We are grateful to our reviewers for encouraging us to consider these cases in detail.
For reasons of space we do not discuss the alternative in which the disjunction scopes over PF.
Embedding PF under essere certo, ‘be certain’, and essere convinto, ‘be convinced’, was judged considerably more acceptable by our consultants than embedding PF under credere, ‘believe’, and pensare, ‘think’, and among the last two, credere was judged worse than pensare. A detailed study of these differences and their significance lies outside the scope of this paper.
All of our ten linguistic consultants gave the B sentence in (66) a score \(\ge 5\) (and six of them gave the sentence a score \(\ge 6\)).
For discussion of the restrictions on the embedding of non-root modals more generally (e.g. epistemic modals), see for example Papafragou (2006).
This proposition is only meaningful with the “frequency” reading: Gianni is more often in his office than at home. The frequency reading is not the intended reading for (68). A second reason to doubt that the comparative phrase più che a casa is part of the prejacent is that there is a clear intonational break and a pitch change (from high to low) between it and the preceding sentence Gianni sarà in ufficio, ’Gianni is presumably in the office’, hence the comma in (68).
For more on diagnosing evidentiality, see Murray (2010) and references therein.
The challenge may only be appropriate if the addressee thinks that the speaker is either lying or is incapable of assessing her own feelings and thoughts (for example, in a situation where the speaker’s judgment is impaired). This is what Korotkova (2019) (based on Anand (2009)) calls performance disagreement.
We saw with C’s utterance in (61) that one can challenge the prejacent itself: this is acceptable because what is challenged in this case is not the subjective assessment but only the truth of the prejacent.
If one assume that, in the context of the example, being a man or a woman exhaust the possibilities, a question like (84) will be interpreted with disjunction taking scope over PF so that the question can be felicitously paraphrased as sarà un uomo o sarà una donna?, ‘will this be a man or will this be a woman?’ Under this binary assumption, interpreting disjunction in the scope of PF would give rise to infelicity since there is only one possible disjunctive proposition that can be construed out of two possibilities.
Even though the contestant is asked to think about a war and a treaty, the answer can still be considered an ‘educated guess’ in that the contestant is going to make an inference based on general facts about wars and treaties, while lacking any specific information about this particular historical event.
As far as we are aware, this fact has not been noted in the previous literature. Fălăuş and Laca (2014) mention that PF is acceptable in rhetorical questions in Spanish and Romanian. This may be a genuine difference between Italian on the one hand and Spanish and Romanian on the other. On closer scrutiny, it might also turn out that rhetorical questions whose answer is presupposed to be obvious in the input context, as in (88), are not felicitous in Spanish and Romanian either. Our Italian informants uniformly rejected rhetorical questions with PF.
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We are grateful to Ashwini Deo, the editor of this paper, and three anonymous reviewers at Linguistics and Philosophy for the extensive and helpful comments we received throughout the reviewing process. For discussions and feedback, we thank the audience at SALT 29, as well as the audiences at the Expressing Evidence workshop held at the University of Konstanz (June 2019), ModUni1 workshop held in Leiden (December 2018), and the Semantics & Pragmatics Reading Group at the University of Toronto. All mistakes are ours. The first author has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant #496697.
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Ippolito, M., Farkas, D.F. Assessing alternatives: the case of the presumptive future in Italian. Linguist and Philos 45, 943–984 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-021-09338-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-021-09338-7