| Description |
1 online resource |
| Series |
Oxford studies in semantics and pragmatics ; 15 |
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Oxford studies in semantics and pragmatics ; 15.
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| Summary |
Expressions of ability exhibit a curious ambiguity, sometimes describing the potential actions of an agent, and in others simply what the agent did on a particular occasion. In aspect-marking languages, the ambiguity extends to abilitative uses of the possibility modal and is governed by aspectual marking, so that imperfective ability takes a pure, potentially unrealized interpretation, but perfective ability gives rise to an actuality entailment, requiring the realisation of the modal complement. Actuality entailments have resisted explanation on approaches which seek to derive them in the composition of modality and aspect. This book lays the groundwork for an account that links both ability and actuality to a novel component in the semantics of ability: causal dependence. On the approach proposed here, ability modals describe a complex causal structure, in which some potential action for an agent is taken to be causally necessary and causally sufficient for the realisation of the modal complement. The proposal is developed by comparing the inferential profile of ability modals to that of complement-entailing implicative verbs (e.g., manage), and aspect-sensitive enough/too predicates (e.g., be fast enough): the predicates types are unified by a shared causal background, but differ with respect in asserted content. Where implicative verbs assert the realisation of their complements' causing conditions, ability and enough/too predicates simply establish the stative potential for their agents to take causing action. This asserted content interacts with a selective perfective aspect to trigger operations of aspectual coercion, resulting in the aspect-sensitive inferential profile of ability ascriptions. The book offers a new perspective on the role of causal dependence in lexical and compositional semantics, and contributes to the development of a growing research program which uses formal, computational causal models as a tool for semantic analysis and explication |
| Notes |
Description based on online resource; title from home page (Oxford Academic, viewed April 1, 2024) |
| Subject |
Compositionality (Linguistics)
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Compositionality (Linguistics)
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Language: reference & general.
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Language.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
0192666827 |
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9780191945007 |
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0191945005 |
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9780192666826 |
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