Ways of Missing

The English adjectival participle missing, in its intransitive (1), transitive (2), and prenominal (3) forms raises a range of interesting interpretational problems.

(1) My bike is missing. 

(2) My bike is missing a pedal. 

(3) The missing pedal can be replaced. 

The problem addressed in the literature (Zimmermann 2010 and Saebo 2014) is that of opacity. In (2) and (3), there need not be, or indeed ever have been, a particular pedal that is missing or being replaced. Opacity is intertwined with the less examined question of the nature and status of the modal component in the lexical meaning of missing. Intuitively, something is missing when it “should be there but isn’t”, but what exactly “should be there” means requires elucidation.

Building on the insights of Zimmermann and Saebo, this talk attempts to characterize this modal component, descriptively and theoretically. First, I distinguish three ways of missing — three readings of sentences with missing — characterized in terms of the presence or absence of three types of inference. I then argue that the empirical landscape is best captured if missing is give a Kratzerian analysis, i.e. one in which modality varies in terms of contextually determined interactions between facts and ideals, rather than one based on a primitive accessibility relation alluding to “completion worlds’’, as in Zimmermann (2010). I end with an expanded list of outstanding issues for which an analysis is still missing.