Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1996 22:31:34 EST From: Larry Horn Subject: Re: may/might distinction I've used minimal pairs like (1) He {might/could} have won but he didn't. (2) #He may have won but he didn't. (3) It was possible for him to win but he didn't. (4) #It's possible that he won but he didn't. for many years in my semantics and pragmatics classes to illustrate the difference between logical and epistemic possibility. This distinction, which I talked about in my (1972) thesis, borrowing from a Lauri Karttunen paper of 1971 and work by philosophers like Saul Kripke and Ian Hacking, has to do with which sorts of possible worlds you look at when you try to figure out the truth conditions of a sentence. (1) and (3) entail something like 'There's a possible world consistent with the physical (etc.) facts of the actual world in which he won', i.e. if certain contingent facts had worked out differently, he would have won. (2) and (4) involve not logical (metaphysical) possibility but epistemic possibility, i.e. that there's a possible world consistent with what I know in which he won. But in saying he DIDN'T win, I'm saying there's no world consistent with what I know in which he won. Well, anyway, the punch line (as nobody who read this far will be startled to learn) is that some time ago--maybe in the mid-1980's--I began realizing that more and more of my students were not sharing my judgments. I think they DID get the distinction; they just didn't preserve the mapping between the semantics and the modal auxiliaries. I share everyone's frustra- tion over the loss, especially since it makes the distinction harder to demonstrate. But then I think it's an occupational disease of linguists to regret all neutralizations, especially those wiping out distinctions we make ourselves. (I do, however, recognize that not everyone shares my grief concerning those careless dialects in which Mary, marry, and merry are not distinguished.) Larry