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Why will is not a modal

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Abstract

In opposition to a common assumption, this paper defends the idea that the auxiliary verb will has no other semantic contribution in contemporary English than a temporal shift towards the future with respect to the utterance time. Strong reasons for rejecting the idea that will quantifies over possible worlds are presented. Given the adoption of Lewis’s and Kratzer’s views on modality, the alleged ‘modal’ uses of will are accounted for by a pragmatic mechanism which restricts the domain of the covert epistemic necessity operator scoping over the sentence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FNRS, Laboratoire de Linguistique Textuelle et de Pragmatique Cognitive, Université Libre de Bruxelles, CP 175 50, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, 1050, Bruxelles, Belgium

    Mikhail Kissine

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  1. Mikhail Kissine
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Correspondence to Mikhail Kissine.

Additional information

I’m extremely grateful to Marc Dominicy for his valuable remarks on earlier drafts. Detailed and penetrating comments by two anonymous referees helped me to improve this paper considerably. Parts of this work have been presented at the Chronos VII conference in Antwerp; I’m grateful to members of the audience for questions and remarks. My research is funded by a research fellow grant from the Fonds National de Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), Communauté Française de Belgique.

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Kissine, M. Why will is not a modal. Nat Lang Semantics 16, 129–155 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-008-9028-0

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