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Live Q&A slot: Friday, 4th Sept, 6pm - 7pm BST (British time) / 1pm - 2pm EST (Eastern US time) / 10:30pm - 11:30pm IST (Indian time). We look forward to talking to all of you at this meeting "room": https://umn.zoom.us/j/94616941344

ABSTRACT: In this work, we present an account of strong and weak deontic necessity modals, by developing a new Relativized Ranked Priority Clusters model which incorporates three levels of detail: (i) it is relativized to each participant in the discourse (ii) it is also sensitive to groups of priorities that may or may not overlap, and (iii) it allows the conjunction of individual priorities and groups of priorities that form the quantificational domains of the modals. We show these can all be done without assuming any ordering sources and without arbitrary classifications of 'primary' and 'secondary' priorities of agents. This model allows us to capture many nuanced contrasts between weak and strong deontic necessity, with some improvements over previous accounts in the existent literature which either assume multiple sequences of ordering sources or mandatory requirements of collective endorsement of priorities to map differences in modal strength. We also explore strong and weak deontic necessity in Bangla (/Bengali), where modals can only take gerund complements, with distinctions within the gerund classes with respect to the interaction with weak vs. strong modals. The facts are accounted for within our model, and an account of the distribution of Bangla modals in non-veridical contexts is also presented.

Note: Our abstract has become outdated as the research has progressed. Please refer to our "Full Handout" file for our fully updated contribution.