Future orientation & free choice

Abstract

Epistemic necessity modals cannot be future-oriented. Previous attempts to explain this ban tie the constraint directly to speakers’ intuitions about the metaphysics of the future. As a result, they fail to predict the range of cross-linguistic variation attested in the domain of temporal orientation. This paper defends a fully grammatical approach to the phenomenon. I assume, with much of the recent literature on temporal orientation, that future orientation stems from a covert temporal morpheme. Then, I proceed to show that in English and in Brazilian Portuguese there is substantial overlap between the distribution of this morpheme and the distribution of Universal Free Choice Items (∀-FCIs), like 'any' in some of its uses.Based on these similarities, I sketch an account of temporal orientation that employs tools from the literature on polarity sensitivity.