earticle

영어

The previous semantic treatment of epistemic must which is based on entailment from ‘what is known’ is not sufficient to provide a proper semantics of must, since it would have to predict that any irrelevant or uninformative proposition can be entailed by what is known, which will definitely lead to a crash of its semantic derivation. In order to remedy this, this paper argues that the evidential component involving the inference from a body of evidence should incorporate into the semantics of epistemic must, along with the epistemic component involving the agent’s judgment of the evidence. According to this analysis, an epistemically modalized sentence is understood to mean that the prejacent is a conclusion that the speaker can reach from the available evidence, rather than an entailment by what is known. The incorporation of evidentiality into the semantics of epistemic must will assist us in understanding how the speaker of an utterance like It must be raining concludes that it is raining when she hears rain drops and why the utterance sounds weird when she sees that it is raining out side.