Dilemmas and Excogitations: An Essay on Modality, Clitics and Discourse (review)

This book sets forth the proposal that the Italian clitic lo, combined with verbs of propositional attitude in clitic-left-dislocation, as in Sandro lo sa che Mario è andato al cinema (‘Sandro it knows that Mario has gone to the cinema’), is tied to the presupposition that the information contained in the embedded clause is true. Additionally, Capone shows that the peculiarities of the presuppositional behavior of lo pose a challenge to widespread views on presupposition.

Ch. 1 deals with the difference between semantic and pragmatic inferences from the perspective of truth-conditional semantics. This distinction is applied to propositional attitude verbs, especially know: The inference that the embedded utterance is true is considered to pertain to the semantics of this verb. Ch. 2 deals with conversational implicatures. After a brief exposition of Paul Grice’s and Laurence Horn’s proposals, C presents Stephen Levinson’s neo-Gricean approach, which he adopts with a few amendments. Ch. 3 is devoted to the use of know in ordinary speech, and suggests that even if it always expresses a strong commitment, due to its semantics, this commitment may be weakened as regards the reliability of the evidence, which may vary from context to context. Ch. 4 is a syntactic study of prodrop and clitic-left-dislocation. The hypothesis is that languages allowing these two constructions also exhibit presuppositional clitics used with verbs of propositional attitude so as to strengthen the speaker’s commitment (and consequently to discard weakened interpretations of these verbs). Ch. 5 shows how the hypothesis works for a number of European languages, mostly Romance and Slavonic. As regards Spanish, I must note that clitic-left-dislocation with lo is infrequent in most varieties: The examples used by C, such as Juan lo entendió que María estaba enfadada con él (‘John it understood that Mary was angry with him’), would sound odd to many native speakers. This inaccuracy is an instance of how the procedure of asking individual informants is not always reliable for obtaining data on foreign languages.

Ch. 6 contains general considerations on presupposition, focusing on the distinction between semantic and pragmatic features. These considerations are applied in Ch. 7 to the presupposition conveyed by lo, which is characterized as a ‘speaker-hearer presupposition’, since it has to belong to the common ground of the speaker and the hearer. Lo (and the same holds for equivalent clitics in other languages) differs from pronominals such as this, that, and it in that, in the clitic-left-dislocation construction, its presupposition is maintained within the scope of modal and conditional expressions and of verbs of hearing and saying. As stated before, this behavior poses a problem for commonly held views of presupposition. The book ends with two appendices describing alternative approaches to presupposition and the projection problem.

In sum, C raises interesting issues on clitics, presuppositions, the projection problem, and the semantics-pragmatics interface. The word ‘modality’ in the title is perhaps misleading since its role is subsidiary within the overall contents.