Open Future and Modal Interpretation of Future Tensed Sentences

Fabio Del Prete (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Toulouse)

Future tensed sentences display a range of modal interpretations across languages. One outstanding problem in the formal semantic literature is whether these modal interpretations are rooted in a modal semantics of the future tense––this would involve quantification over possible worlds, related via some accessibility relation to the actual world––or are rather generated through pragmatic reasoning. To implement the latter alternative one may assume that the semantics of the future only involves reference to times, while reference to alternative worlds would come about due to uncertainty, or some other factor determining that a plurality of worlds has to be considered when evaluating the utterance in context. I will explore a theory in which the interpretation in context of a future tensed sentence may require universal quantification over a set of open alternatives for the conversational participants in the context, and I will evaluate this theory vis-à-vis one which treats the future tense semantically as a necessity modal, by considering data involving quantifiers and negation.