1: Introduction
2: Modal Logic
3: Major Linguistic Theories of Modality
4: Sentential Modality
5: Modality and Other Intensional Categories
Bibliography
Index
Paul Portner is Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University.
He studied philosophy and linguistics at Princeton University and
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where his 1992 PhD
dissertation was on Situation Theory and the Semantics of
Propositional Expressions. He is editor of Formal Semantics:
Essential Readings (Blackwell, 1992) and author of What is Meaning?
(Blackwell, 2005). He is currently writing a book on
Mood, which like the present work will appear in Oxford Surveys in
Semantics and Pragmatics.
`Modality lives up to [its] billing. It serves as an introduction,
giving an overview of the main theories of modality, from modal
logic, through Angelika Kratzers seminal work (Kratzer 1981, 1991),
to more recent approaches.... The book is also a valuable reference
for experts. It summarizes major areas of active debates (e.g.
truth-conditional status of epistemic modality), presents novel
issues and challenges to current theories (e.g. issues of
graded
modality), and offers new solutions and directions, which will
certainly inspire future research.'
Valentine Hacquard, Language
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