This book explores graded expressions of modality, such as more likely than and quite possible, which provide a rich and underexplored source of insight into modal semantics. The volume explores and expands the typology of scales among English adjectives and uses the result to shed light on the meanings of a variety of epistemic and deontic modals.

• Series preface


• Preface


• Acknowledgments


• List of abbreviations


• 1: Gradation, scales, and degree semantics


• 2: Measurement theory and the typology of scales


• 3: Previous work on graded modality: Lewis and Kratzer


• 4: Epistemic adjectives: likely and probable


• 5: Certainty and possibility


• 6: Implications for the epistemic auxiliaries


• 7: Scalar goodness


• 8: Ought and should


• 9: Concluding remarks


• References


• Index

Daniel Lassiter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. His research combines formal tools and experimental methods from linguistics, philosophy, and computational cognitive science to work towards a unified theory of language understanding as a cognitive phenomenon. His work has appeared in journals including Natural Language Semantics, Journal of Semantics, and Cognition.