On Implicative Behavior

This thesis is intended to untangle the ambiguity of verbs and constructions like "be able to", "be too... to" and "be... enough to" in the simple past tense and then give a unified account for implicative behavior. I agree that viewpoint aspect plays a critical role in the implicative behavior of these verbs and constructions. I further argue that three conditions have to be fulfilled in order to carry out an implicative reading: a circumstantial modal base, the complement situation as at least part of the matrix situation in logical representation of the sentence and a perfective viewpoint attributed to the matrix situation in logical representation. In languages with overt aspectual markers, the perfective viewpoint of the sentence is contributed by aspectual markers. But in English, the viewpoint of the sentence is the viewpoint of the matrix situation in logical representation determined by the relation among a reference time, the matrix situation and the complement situation. Therefore, when a verb or construction like "be able to" in the simple past tense is combined with a non-state complement and a reference time that cannot contain a state, the complement situation with a perfective viewpoint becomes the matrix situation in logical representation and there derives an implicative reading in a circumstantial modal base. In addition, I extend Karttunen's definition of "implicative" and propose a new implicative-and-non-implicative distinction on the basis of the three conditions. An implicative encodes the second and third conditions into its semantics and commits the speaker's belief to the truth of its S_complement while a non-implicative does not. Verbs and constructions like "be able to", though at base non-implicative statives, encode the second condition into their semantics and hence are classified into the group of contributor non-implicatives. The sentence with a contributor non-implicative derives an implicative reading when it has a circumstantial modal base, a non-state complement situation and a reference time that can hold not the matrix situation but the complement situation in its time frame.