Scaleless Implicatures, blocked by Actuality Entailments

Abstract

The French necessity modals falloir and devoir can produce wide scope interpretations with respect to negation. However, when they are marked by the perfective aspect, this ability disappears, and they must take narrow scope. In this paper, I present a novel analysis of these modals’ wide scope interpretation, as a ‘scaleless implicature’ – a strengthening phenomenon arising from these necessity modals’ lack of a possibility scalemate. This strengthening, I argue, is blocked by the actuality entailment triggered by the perfective aspect.