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

25.10. Vesela Simeonova (Graz): Modals for the present and for the past in Bulgarian [online]

The interactions of tense and epistemic modals have been subject to a great deal of interest since Condoravdi's (2002) seminal work. Condoravdi argues that past tense can project either higher or lower than the modal, giving rise to epistemic and counterfactual (CF) readings, respectively (and not in both positions). This is illustrated in (1).

(1) Mary might have won the race.
a. epistemic reading: modal > past
b. CF reading: past > modal
c. impossible: past > modal > past

Condoravdi explores this topic predominantly with English data and, as shown in (1), the proposed solution is syntactically covert. Bulgarian is an ideally suited language to test this theory empirically and determine the position at which tense is interpreted relative to the modal, because: (i) it has overtly tensed modals; (ii) it has no infinitives. 
In this talk, I show that some of Condoravdi's predictions are borne out for Bulgarian, while others lead to an additional layer of complexity, and explore the empirical and theoretical consequences of these findings in relation to more recent cross-linguistic developments on epistemic modality.

Condoravdi, Cleo (2002). Temporal interpretation of modals: modals for the present and for the past. In: Beaver, Martinez, Clark, Kaufmann (Eds.), The Construction of Meaning, pp 59-88. CSLI Publications.