Anchoring in grammar: puzzles with epistemic comparatives

This paper discusses two puzzles with epistemic comparatives (ECs) that provide new insights into the interaction between modals, tense, and aspect. We show that, cross- linguistically, ECs pose restrictions on the featural specifications in T(ense). Additionally, we observe that interactions of ECs with modals seem to be non-uniform; while epistemic modals can co-occur with ECs, some modal interpretations of the Romance imperfect ap- pear to be deviant. The analysis we propose sheds light on how anchoring to the Speaker’s Deictic Center in the highest left periphery is manipulated by T and modals (Speas and Tenny 2003, Giorgi 2010, Wiltschko 2014). We argue that interactions between ECs and modals are in fact uniform, as predicted by our analysis. The deviance of the modal imper- fect with ECs is due to an independent reason