Of late, evidentiality has received great attention in formal semantics. In this paper I develop ‘evidentiality-informed’ truth conditions for modal operators such as must and may . With language data drawn from Luoping Nase (a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the P.R. of China and belonging to the Yi Nationality), I illustrate that epistemic modals clash with clauses articulating first-hand information. I then demonstrate that existing models such as Kratzer’s graded possible-worlds semantics fail to provide accurate truth conditions for modals tagging (...) clauses with first-hand information. As a remedy I propose a fuzzy version of possible-worlds semantics with various grades of belief and knowledge. In addition to preserving the expressive power of graded possible-worlds semantics, the fuzzy model will be shown to supply appropriate truth conditions for epistemic modals appended to evidential clauses (i.e. clauses expressing first-hand information). (shrink)

We present a logic for reasoning about attribute dependencies in data involving degrees such as a degree to which an object is red or a degree to which two objects are similar. The dependencies are of the form A ⇒ B and can be interpreted in two ways: first, in data tables with entries representing degrees to which objects have attributes ; second, in database tables where each domain is equipped with a similarity relation. We assume that the degrees form (...) a scale equipped with operations representing many-valued logical connectives. If 0 and 1 are the only degrees, the algebra of degrees becomes the two-element Boolean algebra and the two interpretations become well-known dependencies in Boolean data and functional dependencies of relational databases. In a setting with general scales, we obtain a new kind of dependencies with naturally arising degrees of validity, degrees of entailment, and related logical concepts. The deduction rules of the proposed logic are inspired by Armstrong rules and make it possible to infer dependencies to degrees—the degrees of provability. We provide a soundness and completeness theorem for such a setting asserting that degrees of entailment coincide with degrees of provability, prove the independence of deduction rules, and present further observations. (shrink)