Abstract
Kissine (2008) argues that English will cannot be treated as a modal without entailing absurd consequences. Broekhuis and Verkuyl (2014) object that this argument rests on faulty scope relations between negation and will. In this short squib I argue that holding both that will scopes over negation and that will is a modal leads to absurd consequences.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Needless to say, it would be extremely implausible to argue here that will takes scope over negation. First, this would entail that will moves across clause boundaries, and second, that (16a) means that in all possible worlds w (of will’s modal base) it is the case at t>n that Mary doesn’t sing in all w′ epistemically accessible from w, viz. that (16a) means that it will be impossible that Mary sings at t>n.
References
Broekhuis, Hans, and Henk J. Verkuyl. 2014. Binary tense and modality. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 32: 973–1009.
Enç, Mürvet. 1996. Tense and modality. In The handbook of contemporary semantic theory, ed. Shalom Lappin, 345–358. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kaufmann, Stefan. 2005. Conditional truth and future reference. Journal of Semantics 22: 119–128.
Kissine, Mikhail. 2008. Why will is not a modal. Natural Language Semantics 16: 129–155.
Kissine, Mikhail. 2013. Modalité et marquage du futur. Pour une dissociation sémantique. Cahiers Chronos 26: 165–182.
Klecha, Peter. 2014. Diagnosing modality in predictive expressions. Journal of Semantics 31: 443–455.
Kratzer, Angelika. 1991. Modality. In Semantics: an international handbook of contemporary research, eds. Arnim von Stechow and Dieter Wunderlich, 639–650. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Louise McNally and three anonymous NLLT reviewers for their remarks and comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kissine, M. Will, scope and modality: a response to Broekhuis and Verkuyl. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32, 1427–1431 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9263-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9263-7