Relations between Aspect and Epistemic Modality: some consequences of temporal restrictions on predicate evaluation

Abstract

The paper addresses the aspectual restriction that blocks present oriented epistemic readings for nonstative predicates. Different languages show a similar pattern, among them Spanish, which will be our focus of study. Using a formalist frame, we propose that this restriction derives from the temporal conditions of predicate evaluation and the possibility of being coordinated with the punctual speech time. States are evaluable in points of time, while events must cover an interval (Hallman, 2010). The article develops some empirical consequences of this idea, leading to the claim that two classes of states must be distinguished: pure states and interval states (Dowty, 1979; Jaque, 2014). Finally, we present the formal correlates that our hypothesis has in the syntactic-semantic representation of the verbal phrase.