The Semantics of Modal QAD in Standard Arabic

Abstract

The behavior of modal QAD in Standard Arabic presents a twofold puzzle: first, QAD has an inherent epistemic-denoting conversational background with its lexically-encoded quantificational force being controlled by the temporal-aspectual properties of QAD's prejacent. Second, universal QAD triggers an actuality entailment by default. We resolve this puzzle by proposing a compositional analysis of modal QAD that derives QAD's lexically-encoded duality of force and accounts for universal QAD's automatic implicativity. Keywords: Epistemic-Denoting, Lexically-Encoded Quantificational Force, Actuality Entailment.