BETWEEN EVENTS AND WORLDS UNDER HISTORICAL NECESSITY.pdf

BETWEEN EVENTS AND WORLDS UNDER HISTORICAL NECESSITY Tim Fernando Computer Science Department Trinity College Dublin Tim.Fernando@tcd.ie Abstract. Events and worlds under historical necessity are re-analyzed as schedules of eventuality-types. The perfect and non-root modals in Condoravdi 2002 are refor- mulated, reproducing over schedules the backward time shift in the perfect and the forward time expansion in modals. 1. Introduction Just as (semantic) accounts of modality commonly invoke possible worlds, theories of temporality (eg aspect) often appeal to event[ualitie]s. But what are events? And what are worlds? We can investigate these questions together in works that combine events with worlds, such as Condoravdi 2002, henceforth C2. The perfect and non-root (= epistemic or metaphysical) modals are analyzed in C2 subject to historical necessity (Thomason 1984). That analysis is recounted briefly in §2. A notion of schedule that subsumes events and worlds is presented in §3, on the basis of which the perfect and the modals are reformulated in §4. To more easily digest the formal details that follow, one of the many linguistic exam- ples in C2 should help. (1) He might have won. We can read (1) epistemically as in (2) or metaphysically as in (3). (2) He might have, for all I know, won. (3) He might have, at that stage, won, but he didn’t. The words ‘might’ and ‘have’ are analyzed in C2 by functions MIGHT and PERF, in terms of which (1)’s epistemic reading arises from, roughly put, MIGHT(PERF(he-win)) and (1)’s counterfactual reading from the reversed scoping PERF(MIGHT(he-win)) . We spell this out more precisely next. 2. Temporal properties in C2 The semantic set-up in C2 assumes that the following are given: (i) a set Pt of temporal points/instants linearly ordered by ?, relative to which the set Ti of times can be conceived as consisting of non-empty subsets t of Pt (including singletons) such that for every z ∈ Pt, z ∈ t whenever x ? z ? y for some x, y ∈ t (th