Interpreting past epistemic modals in English, Dutch, and French

What it is about

The question is whether an epistemic modal in the past tense ("It had to be raining last night") gives a present claim about a past event (epistemic above tense) or a past claim (below tense). The authors run two controlled acceptability experiments with identical materials in English (had to), Dutch (moest) and French (devait), with seemed/leek/semblait as a baseline that is known to scope under tense. Each item has a sentence and a continuation: "but I thought Q" (forces the present reading) or "but now I know Q" (forces the past reading). Experiment 1 has 153 native speakers (51 Dutch, 53 English, 49 French) and Experiment 2, speeded, has 148. The main results: the present reading is available in all three languages (Dutch moest 55%, English had to 40%, French devait 57% accepted with "but I thought Q"), and English had to is overall less acceptable than moest and devait. Only Dutch accepts the past reading at a rate close to the baseline. The authors read this as partial support for van Dooren's claim that modal verbs and auxiliaries differ in scope.

Ideas

• I1. A deterministic contradiction test for the world: for a sentence "X had to P but I thought Q" the world should accept it only if the belief event is in the past and Q contradicts P; "but now I know Q" is consistent only with a past claim. Build this as a check in prag/src/infer.rs over frames, and report which rule fired.
• I2. Add a lexical strength feature to the modal entries: must and have to carry strong evidence (the paper's licensing account), seem carries weak evidence. Use it as a gate: a strong modal over weak evidence is marked as a low-confidence reading.
• I3. Flag free indirect discourse. A past narrative frame (earlier past-tense sentences, "he thought") makes the epistemic reading likely, so the pragmatic module should mark the epistemic reading as coming from narrative and not from the present speaker.
• I4. Replicate the design as a test set in languages/en-x-emode/ and the school lessons: 8 items, two continuations, one baseline, judged by the rule system and by counts. Negative control: a deontic context ("the rules said") must be read as root, not epistemic.

For Mova

The chapters are 13. Verbs (modal and semi-auxiliary have to, be after a modal), 30. Pragmatics and discourse: overview and 33. Implicature and presupposition (the contradiction test and the continuation). The code is prag/src/infer.rs (contradiction check), prag/src/irony.rs (for FID-like shifts of viewpoint, to be reused only as a pattern) and en/src/tag.rs (modal features). Measures: accuracy of the contradiction rule on the eight critical items and their continuations, run twice to check identical output; a negative control with deontic subjects and the seemed baseline, which must score as past only.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.20173

@article{dieuleveut2025interpreting,
  title = {{Interpreting past epistemic modals in English, Dutch, and French}},
  author = {Dieuleveut, Anouk and Dooren, Annemarie van},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.20173},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.20173}
}

References

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