2009
Stefan Kaufmann
- Associate Professor
- Northwestern University
Abstract
Ignorance and the passage of time are among the most fundamental and pervasive aspects of human life. People draw conclusions from unreliable evidence, revise their beliefs in view of new information, and base their plans and decisions on expectations about likely outcomes. People also talk about knowledge and ignorance, past and future, best guesses and their factual basis. This project deepens our understanding of the meaning and use of modal and temporal expressions, the inferences involved in their interpretation, and their semantic interactions with each other and other grammatical categories.