Must . . . stay . . . strong!

By Kai von Fintel, Anthony S. Gillies. 2010

220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is a recurring matra that epistemic must creates a statement that is weaker than the corresponding flat-footed assertion: It must be raining vs. It’s raining. Contrary to classic discussions of the phenomenon such as by Karttunen, Kratzer, and Veltman, we argue that instead of having a weak semantics, must presupposes the presence of an indirect inference or deduction rather than of a direct observation. This is independent of the strength of the claim being made. Epistemic must is therefore quite similar to evidential markers of indirect evidence known from languages with rich evidential systems. We work towards a formalization of the evidential component, relying on a structured model of information states (analogous to some models used in the belief dynamics literature). We explain why in many contexts, one can perceive a lack of confidence on the part of the speaker who uses must.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63c6424f241b2e32a69c47bc4d8cb5ecca9942bb

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Citations in the corpus

Contrast and the structure of discourse (2014, background): “23 Note, however, that von Fintel & Gillies (2010) argue that strong epistemic necessity modals do indeed validate this inference, and that the seeming weakness of epistemic must arises because it signals that the speaker has made an indirect inference.”
The semantic roots of positive polarity: epistemic modal verbs and adverbs in English, Greek and Italian (2018, background): “Nonveridicality derives a semantics of universal modals as ‘weak’, i.e., not entailing (knowledge of) the prejacent p, in the tradition of the ‘mantra’ (labelled so by von Fintel and Gillies 2010).”
Triviality for restrictor conditionals (2016, background): “—are inclined to deny Reflexivity (though see von Fintel and Gillies, 2010 for a compelling defense of it).”
Deliberative modality under epistemic uncertainty (2013, background): “Frank (1996) and Geurts (1999) offer independent motivation for the anaphoric nature of modal bases. Owing to these complexities, we refrain from claiming that (17) represents Kratzer’s own analysis. 29 A modal base f is introspective iff for all worlds w, v, if v ∈ ⋂ f (w) then ⋂ f (v) = ⋂ f (w). S”
Must, knowledge, and (in)directness (2016, methodology): “To be clear, this paper will not attempt to provide a conclusive answer to one of the core questions addressed by von Fintel and Gillies (2010)—whether must p entails p.”