The set of English modal verbs is widely recognized to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser, 1990). In this paper I offer an alternative explanation for the later emergence of epistemic interpretations by linking them to the development of the child's theory of mind (Wellman, 1990); if correct, this hypothesis might have important implications for the shape of the semantics of modal verbs.

This paper concerns some interactions between syntax, pragmatics, and semantics exemplified by the development of the Discourse Markers indeed, in fact, besides, and what role they might play in a theory of grammaticalization, especially of the unidirectionality of grammaticalization.

In this paper I will present and defend an analysis of (a sample of) the English modal auxiliary verbs using a relevance-theoretic semantic and pragmatic framework. I will start by discussing previous analyses of modality in English with an eye to explaining how a cluster of related meanings- epistemic, root, and other- is expressed by the same set of lexical items. I will then go on to develop a unitary semantic approach to the English toodais, treating them as (mostly) incomplete propositional operators. After defending the details of my semantic account, I will show how the proposed semantics can give rise to the range of root interpretations modal verbs can receive in context. Epistemic interpretations require some further theoretical machinery, which will make crucial use of the notion of metarepresentation. Finally, I will sketch the differences between natural-language interpretations of modal operators and their alethic/logical uses.

this paper were presented at City University of Hong Kong, the University of Melbourne, and the Australian National University. I would like to thank all those who participated in the discussions at those times, and I would also like to thank Sasha Aikenvald, Ruth Kempson, Steven Nicolle, Michael Pickering, Dan Sperber, and Elizabeth Traugott for sending me written comments. 2 and culture to be able to fill in the gaps in the perception of the utterance that are created by ambient noise. The inferential process becomes conscious when we are trying to understand an illegible word in a hand-written letter.

With grammaticalization theorists becoming increasingly aware of the relevance of constructions to their discipline, one of them even defining grammaticalization as the creation of new constructions, precisely the problem which construction grammarians engaging in diachronic research are addressing (or one they should be addressing be-cause to date the discipline has not really taken off), the question rises of whether grammaticalization theory could simply be turned into the historical branch of con-struction grammar, or whether diachronic construction grammar has its own raison d’être as a separate discipline. Since grammaticalization theoretical practice is fairly narrowly focused on the change of extant constructions along a path towards the grammatical end of the meaning continuum, there definitely is a need for a wider dis-cipline that also concerns itself with the primary emergence of constructions. Though grammaticalization presupposes ‘constructionalization’, the two developments need to be kept apart because not all constructions go on to grammaticalize. They have ap-parently been conflated, however, in two recent discussions of the evolution of argu-ment structure constructions (Schøsler 2003 and Trousdale 2005).

The set of English modal verbs is widely recognised to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser 1990). In this paper I offer an alternative explanation for the later emergence of epistemic interpretations by liniking them to the development of the child's theory of mind (Wellman 1990). If correct, this hypothesis might have important implications for the shape of the semantics of modal verbs.

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