Explaining the Actuality Operator Away
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4822293 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Mackay (0000-0002-4883-195X), J F G Mackay (0000-0003-0716-2638, University of Wisconsin–Madison, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 67 |
| Issue | 269 |
| Pages | 709-21 |
| Publication date | 2017-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Philosophical Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8094 • E-ISSN: 1467-9213 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pq/pqx006 |
| OpenAlex | W2594022326 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 28 |
I argue that ‘actually’ does not have a reading according to which it is synonymous with the actuality operator of modal logic, and propose an alternative account of ‘actually’. The cases that have been thought to show that ‘actually’ is synonymous with the actuality operator are modal and counterfactual sentences in which an embedded clause's evaluation is held fixed at the world of the context. In these cases, though, this embedded clause's evaluation is not due to the presence of ‘actually’. As an alternative, I propose that ‘actually’ is a presupposition trigger along the lines of ‘even’ or ‘too’, and it signals that presupposed information states in the discourse are evolving in a non-standard way.
Context (archaeology) · Counterfactual conditional · Counterfactual thinking · Epistemology · Linguistics · Modal · Modal logic · Modal operator · Operator (biology) · Presupposition · Reading (process) · Computer Science · History · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
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Information structure in discourse
Tense, Modality, and Semantic Values
Adverb Placement
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Quantifying Over Possibilities
Mother Earth, Mother City
Dynamic predicate logic
Semantics and the objects of assertion
The Grammatical Ingredients of Counterfactuality
On the characterization of alternatives
A theory of focus interpretation
Presupposition and Anaphora
Indicative and Subjunctive Conditionals
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |