On the Deliberative Use of the German Modal sollte

Frank Sode*, Ayaka Sugawara

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper is about a particular use of the German modal sollte (‘should’) in the antecendent of conditionals as illustrated in (1)–(3). We call this use the “deliberative” use of sollte. We argue that on its deliberative use sollte doesn’t behave as the weak necessity modal it is standardly assumed to be. The distributional facts suggest that the use conditions of sollte-antecendents are closely related to the use conditions of conditional antecendents with the complementizer falls (‘in case’). Following a recent proposal by Hinterwimmer for falls, we propose that sollte in the antecendent of a conditional introduces a use condition that takes the truth of the antecendent proposition to be a truly open possibility against a given conversational background.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNew Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence - JSAI-isAI 2018 Workshops, JURISIN, AI-Biz, SKL, LENLS, IDAA, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsKazuhiro Kojima, Maki Sakamoto, Koji Mineshima, Ken Satoh
PublisherSpringer
Pages341-356
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9783030316044
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Event10th International Symposium of Artificial Intelligence supported by the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, JSAI-isAI 2018 - Yokohama, Japan
Duration: 2018 Nov 122018 Nov 14

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11717 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference10th International Symposium of Artificial Intelligence supported by the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, JSAI-isAI 2018
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityYokohama
Period18/11/1218/11/14

Keywords

  • Conditionals
  • Epistemic modals
  • Subjunctive mood

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science(all)

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