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Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
Edited by Marco García García and Melanie Uth
[Studies in Language Companion Series 201] 2018
► pp. 203–228

Chapter 7
Presupposed modality

| FU Berlin

My contribution explores the possibility to treat meanings that have intuitively been called surprise and obviousness within a theory of presupposed modal operators. A bird’s eye review of the literature on relevant intonational, morphological and syntactic expressions gathered from a broad range of languages is meant to give an impression both of the importance of these meanings as well as of the lack of a common pragmatic account. The case of miratives in Quechua is discussed considering some new data. The theory is developed in the form of language games and compares the behavior of presupposed modal operators both with the behavior of canonical modal expressions and with presuppositions triggered by lexical items.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Expressions of surprise and obviousness in the linguistic literature
    • 2.1Phonology: Epistemic tunes
    • 2.2Morphology: Mirativity – and some obviousness
    • 2.3Syntax
    • 2.4Empirical trouble
  • 3.Presupposed modality
    • 3.1Expected worlds
    • 3.2Forbidden worlds
    • 3.3Emotional worlds
    • 3.4Presupposed modality mirrors the logical and pragmatic relations of modal operators in at-issue meanings
    • 3.5Heritage properties
    • 3.6Rhetorical uses
  • 4.Conclusions and perspectives
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.201.07rei
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Uth, Melanie & Marco García García
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