Word Order and Adjacency in the Processing of Nested Epistemic Expressions

In this paper, we further investigated the semantic processing of a relatively unexplored construction, namely, the nested structure of two epistemic modals within a single clause, as exemplified in the sentence “He certainly may have forgotten.” Two distinct theoretical approaches may account for the processing of this structure. According to a formal semantics account (Moss, 2015), the meaning of the second modal should be interpreted as within the scope of the first modal. Consequently, if the positions of the two modals are switched, a change in meaning would be expected. On the other hand, a good-enough processing account (Ferreira & Lowder, 2016) predicts a holistic processing mechanism indifferent to the word order of the nested modals. Through a combination of Bayesian data-analytic methods and judgment tasks, we evaluated these two theoretical perspectives in three experiments. The results supported a holistic processing mechanism in line with the good-enough processing framework.

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