Prerna Nadathur

A range of complement-taking predicates give rise to surprising actuality inferences, in which a modally-embedded complement event is understood non-modally, as taking place in the evaluation world.  I argue that actuality inferences can be explained—and unified across predicate classes—on an approach in which the modality of participating predicates is analyzed in causal terms.  This talk focuses on an illuminating case study: enough and too predicates.

Hacquard (2005) observes that, like the ability modals at the heart of the puzzle (Bhatt 1999), enough/too predicates have aspect-sensitive actuality inferences.  Under imperfective marking, French enough predicates like (1a) are compatible with the non-actualization of their complements; their perfective counterparts (as in 1b) show the complement entailment pattern of implicative verbs like French réussir (‘succeed’, ‘manage’; 2).

(1)	a.	Juno était assez rapide pour gagner la course, mais elle n’a pas gagné. Juno was-IMPF fast enough to win the race, but she did not win.
	b.	Juno a été assez rapide pour gagner la course, #mais elle n’a pas gagné. Juno was-PFV fast enough to win the race, #but she did not win.
(2)	Juno { réussissait / a réussi } à gagner la course, #mais elle n’a pas gagné. Juno { managed-IMPF / managed-PFV } to win the race, #but she did not win.

Despite the contrast in (1)-(2), I argue that enough/too inferences are—semantically speaking—instances of implicativity.  I build on a causal account of implicative lexical semantics (Nadathur 2016, 2019) to show that enough/too actuality inferences arise just in case the compositional interaction between grammatical aspect, modal flavour, and the enough/too matrix adjective reproduces the semantic structure of an implicative: that is, where the matrix adjective denotes an actionable property which is causally involved in realizing the enough/too complement, and the perfective aspect induces an eventive interpretation of the matrix assertion.   Insofar as the implicative analysis explains the aspect-sensitivity of enough/too inferences, I suggest that it naturally extends to ability modals’ actuality inferences, when coupled with a causal approach to ability.

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