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This paper investigates the distribution of epistemic modals in attitude contexts in three Romance languages, as well as their potential interaction with mood selection. We show that epistemics can appear in complements of attitudes of acceptance (Stalnaker 1984), but not desideratives or directives; in addition, emotive doxastics (hope, fear) and dubitatives (doubt) permit epistemic possibility modals, but not their necessity counterparts. We argue that the embedding differences across attitudes indicate that epistemics are sensitive to the type of attitude an attitude predicate reports. We show that this sensitivity can be derived by adopting two types of proposals from the literature on epistemic modality and on attitude verbs: First, we assume that epistemics do not target knowledge uniformly, but rather quantify over an information state determined by the content of the embedding attitude (Hacquard 2006, Yalcin 2007. In turn, we adopt a fundamental split in the semantics of attitude verbs between 'representational ' and 'non-representational' attitudes (Bolinger 1968): representational attitudes quantify over an information state (e.g., a set of beliefs for believe), which, we argue, epistemic modals can be anaphoric to. Non-representational attitudes do not quantify over an information state; instead, they combine with their complement via a comparison with contextually-provided alternatives using a logic of preference (cf.

This paper discusses the interaction of aspect and modality, and focuses on the puzzling implicative effect that arises when perfective aspect appears on a 'root' modal: perfective somehow seems to force the proposition expressed by the complement to hold in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world. While all root interpretations of modal auxiliaries (in a language like French) yield the effect, epistemic and addressee-oriented deontic interpretations do not. I show that implicative readings are contingent on the relative position of the modal w.r.t. aspect, and propose a way to derive these readings with perfective, but not with imperfective aspect, while maintaining a fairly conservative semantics for both aspect and modals.

This paper focuses on children's interpretation of sentences containing negation and a quantifier (e.g., The detective didn't find some guys). Recent studies suggest that, although children are capable of accessing inverse scope interpretations of such sentences, they resort to surface scope to a larger Among many others, we would like to thank

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