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

Mi 13.4., 12:30-14: Vesela Simeonova (Graz): A variable modal in questions

The force of epistemic futures in Slavic, Balkan, and Romance languages has been debated: some propose it is variable (Condoravdi, 2003; Rivero, 2014; Rivero and Simeonova, 2014; Rivero and Sheppard, 2016), others that it is fixed and strong (Fălăuş, 2014; Fălăuş & Laca, 2014; Giannakidou and Mari, 2018; Mihoc et al., 2019). This talk shows how interrogative environments can inform the epistemic future's force, capitalizing on the special properties of standard epistemic modals in questions giving rise to so-called 'reflective' questions (Giannakidou & Mari 2019). The empirical focus is on Bulgarian. The results reject a strong force hypothesis and provide novel support for the variable force hypothesis. The formal account is based on Yanovich (2016) on Old English *motan, from which an intriguing explanation of the relationship between futurity and epistemicity can be gleaned.