Embedded Epistemic Modals Pragmatically

Abstract

In Slovenian there is an attitude verb, dopuš?ati (‘allow for the possibility’), which is like an existential dual of believe. My goal is to explain why it cannot embed epistemic modalities with universal force, like must or cannot. I will say that it is because of a competition and equivalence with the corresponding belief sentence. I will revise the contribution of epistemic modals and use blind scalar implicatures to achieve this.