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Will, scope and modality: a response to Broekhuis and Verkuyl

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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.

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Notes

  1. Klecha (2014) presents novel arguments for a modal theory of will and argues that an analysis of will as a historical necessity operator (see Kaufmann 2005) is immune to my (2008) objections. I reserve the detailed discussion this issue deserves for a future paper.

  2. 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

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Louise McNally and three anonymous NLLT reviewers for their remarks and comments.

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  1. LaDisco, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Mikhail Kissine

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  1. Mikhail Kissine
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Correspondence to Mikhail Kissine.

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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

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9263-7

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