Miriam Butt, University of Konstanz
In these two talks (a version of this paper was also presented at Sinn und Bedeutung the Annual Meeting of the German Society for Semantics, at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin, Berlin, December 1997), I looked at some Urdu complex predicates which receive an entirely unexpected reading in the imperfect.
(1) Nadya gaarii calaa le-tii hai
N.Nom car.Nom drive take-Impf.F.Sg be.Pres.Sg
`Nadya does/will drive a car.'
This reading entails not only that Nadya is able to drive a car, but that she actually does so. It contrasts with the run-of-the-mill modal construction (``sak" `can') in the following way: while the modal could be used to describe a context in which Nadya in principle knows how to drive a car, but hasn't done so for about 20 years, this could not be the case for (1). The ``le"-construction entails that Nadya does in fact excercise her ability.
The closest analog in the literature to the semantics of this ``ability" construction are found in Lawler's (1973a,b) descriptions of existential or ``dispositional" generics in English, such as in `My pet toad will eat flies', which predicates not only the toad's potential to eat flies, but also asserts that the toad does in fact engage in this activity.
A further twist to the story is provided by passives (most commonly used in the negative) which appear to provide a reading very close to the disposition/ability reading of (1). In the passives, furthermore, this reading is not limited to the imperfective, but also appears in perfects and futures.
Lawler argued for a modal interpretation of these readings, and I follow him in presenting an analysis of the constructions in terms of Kratzer's (1981) theory of modality in which the complex predicates are analyzed in terms of conditional necessity, while the ``passives", which actually turn out to be complex predicates as well, receive an analysis in terms of a modal of ability.