Perfect and Imperfect Modals in Romance Some syntactic remarks on the Tense/Modality interaction

Abstract

This paper addresses the interplay between Tense-Aspect and Modality in Romanian and some Romance languages, in ambiguous sentences that exhibit what has been called “perfective raising”. It is observed that Romanian does not behave like French, for instance, inasmuch perfective forces actuality entailment on modals. I show that this contrast is connected to the structure of Romanian modal sentences: as commonly assumed in the literature, modal verbs in Romanian behave like lexical verbs with clausal complements; they have their own temporal-aspectual domain, which has to obey interpretive constraints. I propose that the ambiguity between root and epistemic readings in the perfective is the effect of two combined factors: perfective/imperfective Aspect and a high degree of grammaticalization of the modal (i.e. monoclausal structures for modals).

Keywords

• epistemic vs. abilitative readings of modals
• actuality entailment (AE)
• perfective raising
• restructuring.