Modal subordination of propositional anaphora: On the role of tense and the modal particle ook in contextual counterfactuals in Dutch

Abstract

This paper examines a variant of modal subordination that involves reference to propositions that have been introduced in the scope of a negative operator. In the dialogues under consideration, this kind of reference is most reliably established if the modal particle (MP) ook and past perfect morphology are present in the response, which contains the anaphor (Meijer 2016). We provide experimental evidence that supports this empirical claim and provide a theoretical explanation for the data. We assume that the discourses at issue involve contextual counterfactuals (CFs) whose antecedent may be positive or negative and provides the antecedent for the anaphor. CFs with a negative antecedent ‘doubt’ the truth of the previous utterance, whereas CFs with a positive antecedent do not. As a consequence, the MP, which presupposes that the epistemic modal base already entailed the previously uttered proposition, is incompatible with the former but not the latter type of CF (Meijer 2016). For the tense marking we propose that the effects are due to the local interpretation of the non-fake tense in the consequent of the CF (cf. Ippolito 2013).