Modality and the semantics-pragmatics interface

This thesis explores certain aspects of the structure of lexical semantics and its \ninteraction with pragmatic processes of utterance comprehension, using as a case-study \na sample of the English modal verbs. Contrary to previous polysemy-based accounts, I \npropose and defend a unitary semantic account of the English modals, and I give a \nrelevance-theoretic explanation of the construction of their admissible (mainly, root and \nepistemic) contextual interpretations. Departing from previous accounts of modality, I \npropose a link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation, and treat the \nemergence of epistemic modal markers as a result of the development of the human \ntheory of mind. \nIn support of my central contention that the English modals are semantically \nunivocal, I reanalyse a range of arguments employed by previous polysemy-based \napproaches. These arguments involve the distributional properties of the modals, their \nrelationship to truth-conditional content, the status of so-called speech-act modality, and the \nhistorical development of epistemic meanings: it turns out that none of these domains can \noffer reasons to abandon the univocal semantic analysis of the English modals. Furthermore, \nI argue that the priority of root over epistemic meanings in language acquisition is \npredicted by the link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation. Finally, data \nfrom a cognitive disorder (autism) are considered in the light of the metarepresentation \nhypothesis about epistemic modality. \nThe discussion of modality has a number of implications for the concept of \npolysemy. I suggest that, despite its widespread use in current lexical semantics, \npolysemy is not a natural class, and use the example of the Cognitive Linguistics to \nillustrate that polysemy presupposes some questionable assumptions about the \nstructure of lexical concepts. I propose a division of labour between ambiguity, \nsemantic underdeterminacy, and a narrowed version of polysemy, and present its \nramifications for the psychology of word meaning. In the final chapter, I extend the \nproposed framework for modality to the analysis of generic sentences, thereby \ncapturing certain similarities between genericity and modality.