Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Can you see? Actuality Entailments in the present

Abstract :

Crosslinguistically, ability modal statements about the past like exhibit a curious duality of interpretation: in some contexts, they describe the agent’s potential to perform an action, in some others, they describe an actual action performed on a specific occasion (Thalberg 1972, Bhatt 1999, a.o.). In this talk, I argue that present ability modal statements, like (2), display the same ambiguity, but in a puzzlingly restricted way. Only (2a), where the modal can takes a perception verb (see) as its complement, is ambiguous. (2b), with an eventive complement (reach), can only express a general ability.

(1) Tom was able to swim across the lake { in those days / yesterday }.

(2) a. Tom can seethe summit { when the weather is good / right now }.                  +general ability / +actualized   

    b. Tom can reachthe summit{ when the weather is good / # right now }.           +general ability / *actualized

Why this ambiguity, and why is it, in the present, restricted to perception verbs?

I propose that:

(i) In present ability statement, as established in the past by the literature on Actuality Entailments (Bhatt 1999, Hacquard 2006, a.o.), the ambiguity depends on grammatical aspect: general ability readings are due to the imperfective, and actualized readings, to the perfective.

(ii) The usual unavailability of actualized interpretations in the present comes from the Present Perfective Paradox (Malchukov 2009, Hacquard 2006): a general incompatibility across languages of perfective aspect with present tense, due to the fact that the event time, a time interval, cannot be contained within the punctual speech time. This paradox is usually taken to explain why for instance in English, simple present tense (non-modal) sentences can’t describe ongoing events (3a).

(iii) Perception verbs are special in that only they are able to combine with perfective in the present. This further explains their puzzling behavior in simple present (non-modal) sentences: as we can and do see in (3b), they can (contrary to eventives) describe ongoing events (Vendler 1967). This is one of the reasons why they are often said to be statives. I’ll argue against this view.

(3) a. Tom sees the summit.                                       generic / actualized

    b. Tom reaches the summit.                                   generic  / *actualized  

I’ll discuss the shortcuts of this proposal, and potential avenues to explore from there.