The received wisdom on ability modals is that they differ from their epistemic and deontic cousins in what inferences they license and better receive a universal or conditional analysis instead of an existential one. The goal of this paper is to sharpen the empirical picture about the semantics of ability modals, and to propose an analysis that explains what makes the can of ability so special but that also preserves the crucial idea that all uses of can share a common lexical semantics. The resulting framework combines tools and techniques from dynamic and inquisitive semantics with insights from the literature of the role of agency in deontic logic. It explains not only why the can of ability, while essentially being an existential modal operator, sometimes resists distribution over disjunction and interacts with its duals in particular and hitherto unnoticed ways, but also has a tendency to license free choice inferences.

中文翻译：

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关于能力的两个谜题可以

关于能力模态的公认智慧是，它们与它们的认知和道义表亲的不同之处在于它们许可的推理，并且更好地接受普遍或条件分析而不是存在主义分析。本文的目标是锐化有关能力模态语义的经验图景，并提出一种分析，以解释是什么使能力如此特殊，但也保留了所有使用 can 共享一个共同词汇语义的关键思想. 由此产生的框架将来自动态和好奇语义的工具和技术与对代理在道义逻辑中的作用的文献的见解相结合。它不仅解释了为什么能力的罐头，同时本质上是一个存在的模态运算符，