Modal-Aspect interactions in Bangla

Abstract

Bhatt (1999) observed that ability modals crosslinguistically carry an actuality entailment when they appear with the perfective aspect (e.g., the English John was able to swim the English Channel (on the episodic reading of the sentence) entails that John did, indeed (manage to) swim the English Channel). The imperfective counterpart, however, lacks this entailment. Hacquard (2006, 2009) showed that Bhatt’s generalization is insufficiently general in that the actuality entailments appear with all root modals, not just ability modals, independently of whether they are possibility or necessity modals. This paper presents novel data from Bangla where modals can take the progressive as well as the perfective aspect morphology, and also carry an actuality entailment, that asserts the actual existence of a process rather than the culmination. I show that this can be explained on Hacquard’s general account of Modal-Aspect interactions if one adopts a perspective on the semantics of the Progressive that has a component of its meaning anchored in the world of evaluation over and above its modal component. The actuality entailment with the Perfect also follows on particular assumptions about its meaning.