Modality Across Syntactic Categories

Ana Arregui is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. Her research is in the domain of natural language semantics, focusing on modality, tense, and aspect. Her publications include articles in Natural Language Semantics, Journal of Semantics and Linguistics and Philosophy. She holds a Licenciatura en Letras from the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Maria Luisa Rivero is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her research has focused on syntax and semantics, most recently paying particular attention to aspect, modality, and tense, with emphasis on languages of the Romance and Slavic families and those of the Balkan peninsula.


Andres Salanova is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. His research has concentrated on the structure of Mebengokre, a Je language spoken in central Brazil, and his publications have looked at topics ranging from phonology to the semantics of aspect in that language. He has conducted field research in central Brazil since 1996, and is more broadly interested in the history and ethnography of the South American lowlands.

1. Introduction, Ana Arregui, Maria Luisa Rivero, and Andres Salanova
Part I: Low Modality
2. Epistemic indefinites: On the content and distribution of the epistemic component, Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito
3. Modal indefinites: Where do Japanese wh-kas fit in?, Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Junko Shimoyama
4. The non-modality of opinion verbs, David-Etienne Bouchard
5. Modality in the nominal domain: The case of adnominal conditionals, Ilaria Frana
6. Sublexical modality in defeasible causative verbs, Fabienne Martin and Florian Schafer
7. Straddling the line between attitude verbs and necessity modals, Aynat Rubinstein
8. May under verbs of hoping: The evolution of the modal system in the complements of hoping verbs in Early Modern English, Igor Yanovich
Part II: Middle Modality
9. In an imperfect world: Deriving the typology of counterfactual marking, Bronwyn M. Bjorkman and Claire Halpert
10. Dimensions of variation in Old English modals, Remus Gergel
Part III: High Modality
11. Aspect and tense in evidentials, Ana Arregui, Maria Luisa Rivero, and Andres Salanova
12. Past possibility cross-linguistically: Evidence from 12 languages, Sihwei Chen, Vera Hohaus, Rebecca Laturnus, Meagan Louie, Lisa Matthewson, Hotze Rullmann, Ori Simchen, Claire K. Turner, and Jozina Vander Klok
13. A modest proposal for the meaning of imperatives, Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou