Who is Right, Who is Wrong? Interpreting 14 Points of Wilson – A Case Study of Deontic Modals and their Meanings

The document titled “14 points of Wilson” was announced by the President of the United States Woodrow Wilson in his speech addressed to the United States Congress on 8th January 1918. The speech is one of the most well known documents of the First World War as it touched upon several world issues. The text has been interpreted ever since in respect to the importance and real meaning of points formulated by Wilson. One of the points referred to Poland. The aim of the paper is to focus on the exponents of deontic modality used in that text of historical value and to find the answer to the question concerning the deontic value of each point. The analysis will encompass the principles of deontic logic as well as the meaning of deontic modals in legal discourse at the time of speech delivery as those 14 points should be classified as a text belonging to legal genres. The aim of the paper is to present the historical background and the linguistic analysis in order to find out whether historical facts, interpretations and language used correspond with one another.

Prudential Language and Context (I)

This chapter examines evaluative prudential language (good for etc.) and directive prudential language (ought, must, needs etc.) and argues for forms of contextualism about each of these types of language. In the case of ‘good for’ talk, it shows how recent work by Steve Finlay (2014) on the context-sensitivity of ‘good’ supplies a plausible theory of ‘good for’. It then moves on ‘needs’ talk, showing how work on deontic modals from, and inspired by, Angelika Kratzer (1977) can be applied in a way that illuminates how ‘needs’, and the like, function in prudential contexts.

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Deontic Modality of Obligation and Prohibition in Arabic/English Constitutions

It is argued that legal language should be formal, precise and clear to avoid ambiguity and/or misunderstanding. As rights and duties are communicated through modals, clarity and precision in drafting and translating them is crucial. Otherwise, there is a possibility of conveying loose messages in the source text or different and/or inconsistent messages in the target text. However, the drafting of Arabic modal expressions does not follow clear guidelines, and their translation differs from one translator to another. This paper investigates how deontic modality of obligation and prohibition is used in The Leeds Annotated Parallel Corpus of Arabic-English Constitutions in comparison to The Leeds Monolingual Corpus of English Constitutions. More specifically, the paper presents a classification of these modal expressions and investigates the different lexical variants expressed in a Corpus of Arabic Constitutions. The paper uses corpus-based tools to analyse the different lexical forms used for deontic modality of obligation and prohibition in Arabic and how they are rendered into English. Results of such analysis are compared to a non-translated Corpus of English Constitutions to find out whether the deontic meaning of the modals is comparable to the set of deontic modals used in the constitutions originally drafted in English. The corpus-based analysis gave a detailed classification of a variety of modal expressions used in the Arabic Corpus. It also showed that the translation of deontic modals of obligation and prohibition from Arabic into English is influenced by the source text lexical variations; however, the corpus techniques employed in the study managed to capture some comparable modals in both corpora.

The Factuality Status of Chinese Necessity Modals Exploring the Distribution Via Corpus-Based Approach

This paper is intended to test the deontic vs anankastic hypothesis outlined by Sparvoli (2012). The stipulation is that, in past contexts, the deontic modals trigger a counterfactual inference while the anankastic (here called, goal-oriented modals) either triggers an actuality entailment effects (“only possibility” modals) or a generic non-factual reading (“mere necessity” modals). The result of this corpus-based study conducted in a Chinese-English parallel corpus confirm the crucial role played by the deontic vs goal-oriented contrast in the marking of factuality in Chinese and shows that the factuality value decreases across a cline from goal-oriented to deontic modals.

Negotiating dominance on Facebook: Positioning of self and others in pro- and anti-Trump comments on immigration

The article examines the use of the modal auxiliaries MUST and HAVE (GOT) TO in politically charged online communication. Comments from D. Trump’s official Facebook page were categorized according to the ideological position of the commenters and further divided into employing deontic or epistemic senses of the modals. The analysis was based on the assumption that the proportion of epistemic and deontic modals in the supportive and critical comments reflects the stances of equality or superiority assumed by the commenters. The hypothesis that pro- and anti-Trump camps assume different stances while debating immigration was confirmed as the proportion of deontic and epistemic senses of the modals differed significantly between the two groups. There were also differences in the use of passive voice referring to in- and out- groups. The results are used to make inferences about the underlying ideology of Trump supporters and the prevalent attitudes in the population under study.

Deontic modals and hyperintensionality

In this paper I argue that deontic modals are hyperintensional, i.e. logically equivalent contents cannot be substituted in their scope. I give two arguments, one deductive and the other abductive. First, I show that the contrary thesis (that deontic modals are not hyperintensional) leads to falsity; second, I argue that a hyperintensional theory of deontic modals fares better than its rivals in terms of elegance, theoretical simplicity and explanatory power (e.g. Ross’s paradox, the Gentle Murderer, The Good Samaritan, Free Choice Permission and the Miners’ Paradox disappear). I then propose a philosophical analysis of this thesis and outline some consequences. In Section 1 I introduce and define deontic modality and hyperintensionality. In Section 2 I give a reductio for the hyperintensionality of deontic modals. If the argument is sound, a useful corollary is that deontic modals are also non-intensional, and therefore possible-world semantics accounts are illfitted for them. I then show how the main result can be strengthened or weakened by varying the definition of logical validity. In Section 3 I give an abductive argument for the hyperintensionality of deontic modals, arguing that with a single move we are able to solve many paradoxes and puzzles traditionally troubling deontic logic. I present a version of a hyperintensional deontic logic in an appendix, which I prove is sound and complete with respect to a version of truthmaker semantics.

Assertion and Modality

This essay is an opinionated exploration of the constraints that modal discourse imposes on the theory of assertion. Primary focus is on the question whether modal discourse challenges the traditional view that all assertions have propositional content. This question is tackled largely with reference to discourse involving epistemic modals, although connections and parallels with deontic modals and conditionals are noted along the way. The essay also discusses the impact of the idiosincrasies of modal discourse on the theory of assertion. The first topic in this thread is whether the relevant fragment of modal discourse is subject to some of the norms of assertion that are ordinarily invoked for nonmodal discourse. The second topic is whether theories of assertion that focus on the effects of assertions on context must be viewed as fundamentally disjunctive in order to capture the distinctions between modal and nonmodal assertion.