as part of my current nsf grant on the semantics and pragmatics of modals in natural language, i’m hosting a series of mini-workshops here in the deuce.

(the mini-workshops aren’t regular, they’re occasional. and there’s a regular reading group associated with them - hence, omg. all of that is so i can send emails with subject-lines like “omg: this week’s reading”.)

anyway, we had our first mini-workshop last week: kai von fintel presented a paper, “must … stay … strong!”, that we’ve been working on lately. this is the fourth paper in our trilogy on epistemic modals, and is affectionately known as “shatner” to us. in it we take aim at the mantra that must p is weaker than p and give a new account of the evidential feel that must has.

chris potts and craige roberts gave us comments and provided lots of good stuff for us to think about. (so it was an invasion but a fun one.)

we’re mid-revision on the paper right now but we’ll get a draft up asap.