Dependent modals

Abstract

This article explores the semantics of modal adverbs/particles. Specifically, I focus on the counterpart of perhaps in Japanese which can only occur in a polar question or an epistemic possibility statement. I propose a discourse-oriented approach to this distributional pattern: they espouse a plausible answer to a question given in the discourse, but at the same time require that this question is still open after the utterance. A non-modal statement cannot satisfy these two constraints simultaneously because asserting an answer to a question necessarily closes the question, deriving the restricted distribution under polar questions and epistemic possibility statements. I discuss its implication to the semantic theories of concord phenomena.