Future-past Asymmetries, Evidential Grounding, and Projection

EasyChair Preprint 9428

Abstract

I develop a lexical solution to some important puzzles recently discovered by Ninan (2022), which highlight striking asymmetries between future- and past-directed talk. Ninan notices that, in some cases, the very same evidence may support a future-directed claim but not a roughly equivalent past-directed claim. I develop the idea that the solution to this puzzle is to be found in the different evidential constraints imposed by modal items such as "will", as opposed to bare predications in the past tense. In developing this approach it is key to observe that such evidential constraints project in systematic ways, though not in the ways in which ordinary presupposition project. The paper's task is to describe these patterns of projection and to propose a system that captures them.

Keyphrases: evidentiality, future discourse, projection, tense, will

@booklet{EasyChair:9428,
  author    = {Fabrizio Cariani},
  title     = {Future-past Asymmetries, Evidential Grounding, and Projection},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 9428},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}