Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

This talk presents new insights, based on data from Bulgarian, on the interaction between counterfactual morphology and the interpretation of necessity and desire modals. The starting point is a puzzle presented by von Fintel & Iatridou (2008; 2023) that in some languages: (i) CF morphology ("X-marking") is used to turn a strong necessity modal into a weak necessity one, and want into wish; (ii) in addition, X-marked modals are ambiguous: the CF-marked modal claim can be evaluated in the actual world or in a CF world (endo vs exo readings). 

In this talk I show that Bulgarian has two morphologically distinct X-markers: weak CF (X') and strong CF (X''), thanks to which all readings identified by von Fintel & Iatridou (2023) are morphosemantically disambiguated. The pattern that emerges is that the choice between X' and X'' marking on modals correlates with CF strength in their interpretations. This informs the nature of the relationship between X-morphology and modals in new ways and relates to recent works that identify a richer morphological inventory for CF marking, e.g. in Portuguese (Ferreira, 2023), Japanese (Mizuno, 2024), Serbian (Kaufmannn & Todorovic, 2024), and Palestinian Arabic and Hebrew (Karawani, 2014).