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THE PROBABILISTIC CONSTRUAL OF MODALITY

Objetivo

The project concerns the semantics of modal expressions in language, and in particular modal verbs such as 'might', 'must' and 'can'. The hypothesis under investigation is the Probabilistic Construal of Modality, stating that modal verbs like the above should be given a semantic analysis in terms of (among other things) probability functions. This is a very active topic of research within philosophy and linguistic semantics, which is generating a large amount of literature. The project will improve on the state of the art in this literature in four respects. First, it will clarify the basic question, outlining explicitly the methodology for a systematic study of the PCM hypothesis. Second, it will undertake a systematic investigation of the compositional interactions of modals and other operators in language. Third, it will draw much needed conceptual connections between the semantics of modality and probabilistic models of belief. Finally, it will revisit important classical literature on the connection between probabilities of conditional statements and conditional probabilities.

Convocatoria de propuestas

FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG
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Coordinador

UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
Aportación de la UE
€ 100 000,00
Dirección
WOODHOUSE LANE
LS2 9JT Leeds
Reino Unido

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Región
Yorkshire and the Humber West Yorkshire Leeds
Tipo de actividad
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Contacto administrativo
Benjamin Williams (Mr.)
Enlaces
Coste total
Sin datos