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A unified analysis of the future as epistemic modality

The view from Greek and Italian

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Abstract

We offer an analysis of the Greek and Italian future morphemes as epistemic modal operators. The main empirical motivation comes from the fact that future morphemes have systematic purely epistemic readings—not only in Greek and Italian, but also in Dutch, German, and English will. The existence of epistemic readings suggests that the future expressions quantify over epistemic, not metaphysical alternatives. We provide a unified analysis for epistemic and predictive readings as epistemic necessity, and the shift between the two is determined compositionally by the lower tense. Our account thus acknowledges a systematic interaction between modality and tense—but the future itself is a pure modal, not a mixed temporal/modal operator. We show that the modal base of the future is nonveridical, i.e. it includes p and ¬p worlds, parallel to epistemic modals such as must, and present arguments that future morphemes are a category that stands in between epistemic modals and predicates of personal taste. We identify, finally, a subclass of epistemic futures which are ratificational, and argue that will is a member of this class.

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Notes

  1. We use FUT in this article to refer to expressions of future cross-linguistically, i.e. English will, Italian future morpheme (called futuro in the Italian grammars and literature), and Greek tha are FUT. We also use FUT to indicate the semantic function: FUT in various languages are realizations of the operator FUT in this sense. In the text, it is easy to see which sense is intended, but we also clarify when necessary. Likewise, we use MUST to refer to expressions of universal epistemic modality cross-linguistically, i.e. English must, Italian dovere and Greek prepi are MUST.

  2. There is also a deterministic view: no unsettledness, just one future but we lack knowledge of it (Kissine 2008). That would render future morphemes tense operators. A mixed position could also be conceived, namely that future morphemes are ambiguous between modals and tenses. Such a view would stumble upon the fact that the temporal information correlates with lower tense, as we shall see. The possibility for modal and temporal ambiguity in any case should be dispreferred if an unambiguous analysis succeeds.

  3. Pietrandrea (2005) uses the term ‘epistemic future’ for the first time for Italian future, but only for the epistemic use of the future. We thank Fabio Del Prete for bringing this point to our attention.

  4. The past can be non-relative (Greek), or relative (Italian); see Verkuyl (2011) for more on the notion of relative past, and our discussion in Sect. 5.

  5. PERF stands for the semantic perfective. From now on, we use lower case to refer to the morphological components, and the capital letters for the semantic components.

  6. Epistemic will with the past is odd, as indicated. We suggest why this is so in our discussion of will in Sect. 6.3.

  7. See Giannakidou (2013a) for a formal connection between truth and existence.

  8. See Bernardi (2002) for type-flexible definitions.

  9. An anonymous reviewer points out adverbs such as evidently, clearly, unfortunately, which could be seen as veridical. But these are factive adverbs; our point above is that modal adverbs are nonveridical, not all adverbs.

  10. Negation is the prototypical antiveridical operator, responsible for licensing negative polarity items (Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2013b). Of the other logical connectives, disjunction is also nonveridical whereas conjunction is veridical.

  11. We are grateful to the reviewers of this paper for prompting questions to this end.

  12. Individual anchoring of truth should be seen on a par with other kinds of anchoring of propositional content, i.e. temporal anchoring, or event anchoring (e.g. Hacquard 2006, 2010).

  13. The difference between knowledge and belief is not important for our purposes here, and in many other cases, e.g. for mood choice, it doesn’t matter—as verbs of knowledge and belief both select the indicative in many languages (Giannakidou and Mari 2016b). Mari (2016) however refines the typology of non-epistemic and fictional attitudes and shows that there is a systematic ambiguity between expressive-belief (the classical Hintikkean belief) and inquisitive-belief (the subjunctive trigger for languages in which mood is parametric to the status of p in the common ground). These differences do not matter here, and we only focus on the Hintikkean interpretation of belief.

  14. See, however, Mari (2016) for the distinction between expressive and inquisitive belief, based on mood distribution in Italian.

  15. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their insights that led to this discussion.

  16. There are two exceptions to the Nonveridicality axiom, and both result in trivialization of modality. The first exception is the actuality entailment of an ability modal, in which case the modal is trivialized (see Mari forthcoming-a). The second is with aleithic modality, as in 1 + 1 must equal 2. Giannakidou and Mari (2016b) treat similar deductive contexts with must as involving aleithic modality, thus maintaining the nonveridicality axiom (and therefore the so-called weakness of the modal (Karttunen 1972)). With both aleithic modality and actuality entailment, the distinction between modal and non modal statement is lost.

  17. It should be clear that our notation M(i) corresponds to the Kratzerian notation using set intersection \(\cap f_{epistemic}(w_{0},i)\), where this returns the set of worlds compatible with what it is known in \(w_{0}\) by i.

  18. Since only those worlds are considered in which all the propositions in \(\mathcal{S}\) are true, the function Best determines a cut-off point.

  19. On how our account differs from von Fintel and Gillies (2010), see Giannakidou and Mari (2016b). We further say there that MUST and FUT are biased towards p because the Best worlds are in the p set. See also Lassiter (2014).

  20. We are grateful to the reviewers for their useful feedback on these central points.

  21. The individual anchor for us is always a parameter of evaluation, and may (embedding with propositional attitudes) or may not be syntactically present (as in unembedded sentences).

  22. Note that, for MacFarlane (2005) the future sentences cannot be assigned a truth value at the time of utterance. For us, it is assigned a truth value, it is true/false, parametrically to i.

  23. An anonymous reviewer points to us the following excerpt from MacFarlane (2014).

    Suppose you are standing in a coffee line, and you overhear Sally and George discussing a mutual acquaintance, Joe. SALLY says: Joe might be in China. I didn’t see him today. GEORGE: No, he can’t be in China. He doesn’t have his visa yet. SALLY: Oh, really? Then I guess I was wrong. It seems that George is contradicting Sally and rejecting her claim. It also seems that, having learned something from George, Sally concedes that she was wrong. Finally, it seems appropriate for her to retract her original claim, rather than continuing to stand by it. Think how odd it would be were she to respond: SALLY: Oh, really? # Still, I was right when I said ‘Joe might be in China,’ and I stand by my claim.

    Extending the argument for epistemic English might to Italian and Greek future, we would claim that those who judge epistemic/future claims to be false when the prejacent is false are looking at the bare propositional content excluding the speaker index. Those who judge such claims to be true even when the prejacent is false are looking at thefinal truth value including the speaker index. For clarity we are glossing truth/falsity as truth i /falsity i to highlight those cases in which the speaker index is taken into account. We thank the reviewer for providing this material.

  24. When the prejacent is stative (and the time of evaluation is not forward-shifted), the modal has an epistemic interpretation. According to Condoravdi (2002) the modal has a metaphysical interpretation in (95a).

  25. As often noted, forward-shifting is observed with statives too, e.g. as in ‘Domani sarà malato’ (Tomorrow he will be ill), see Giannakidou and Mari (2016b) for details.

  26. Note that metaphysical modality also involves knowledge, just like any statement, including non-modalized ones. However, a metaphysical modal as in The Western underground orchid can grow here does not involve a non-veridical epistemic state. Just as the non-modalized version The Western underground orchid grows around here, it involves subjective veridicality (recall Sect. 3.2): the speaker knows that the conditions for having orchids growing here are met. This is subjective veridicality. On the other hand, the metaphysical modality is not implicative: it is not entailed that the orchid actually grows here (the modality is only compatible with orchid growing here). In our terms, metaphysical modality presupposes non-veridicality in the metaphysical space. It does not presuppose non-veridicality in the subjective space, which is the one targeted by future sentences and epistemic modals.

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Acknowledgements

We have been working on various aspects of the material presented in this paper for quiet a while, and have benefitted from presenting it in a number of venues (the Amsterdam Colloquium, colloquia at the University of Groningen, University of Leiden, Free University of Brussels, Princeton University, École Normale Superieure, Northwestern University, the 2015 ESSLLI Summer-school in Barcelona, and the Linguistics and Philosophy workshop at the University of Chicago). We are grateful to the audiences of these events for their feedback. We want to thank in particular Fabrizio Cariani, Bridget Copley, Jack Hoeksema, Chris Kennedy, Mikhail Kissine, Frank Veltman, and Malte Willer for their more involved comments. A special thanks is due to the three NLLT reviewers for their careful engagement with our material, and their many useful insights and encouragement. Finally, a big thank you to Henriëtte de Swart, who guided us through the process as handling editor and whose comments and suggestions lead to considerable improvements in both content and form. As for Alda Mari, this research was funded by ANR-10- LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL. This paper was written during her stay at the University of Chicago in 2014–2016. Alda Mari also gratefully thanks the CNRS-SMI 2015. The order of the authors is alphabetical.

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  1. Linguistics Department, University of Chicago, Rosenvald Hall, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA

    Anastasia Giannakidou

  2. Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, ENS, EHESS, 29, rue d’Ulm, 75005, Paris, France

    Alda Mari

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Giannakidou, A., Mari, A. A unified analysis of the future as epistemic modality. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 36, 85–129 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-017-9366-z

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