On Thursday, February 28, Vincent Homer from the École normale supérieure-Paris will give a talk at 4:00 in Machmer W-27. His talk is entitled "Escape!" and an abstract follows:
Escape!
Modal verbs have intriguing scopal properties, which have received relatively little attention in the semantic literature. Compare can and must (both interpreted deontically):
(1) John can’t jog.
(2) John mustn’t jog.
If we are right to treat can as having existential force and must as having universal force, there is a puzzle: can takes obligatory narrow scope in (1), while in the exact same frame, must takes obligatory wide scope (2). This talk has one main goal: show that the contrast is due to a movement–I label it escape–which only certain modals can undergo. In the case at hand, it is must that moves because it is unacceptable in a negative environment, while can doesn’t move, because it has no reason to do so. I will study escape in detail, (i) because it has properties that set it apart from other known displacements, viz it is motivated by polarity and it is a last resort, and also (ii) because of the original light it sheds on modals and on the interplay of syntax and semantics in the mechanism of polarity item licensing.
