Mood variation with belief predicates: Modal comparison in semantics and the common ground

This paper proposes that subjunctive in the complement of belief sen- tences in Italian expresses a relation between the attitude holder’s beliefs and the common ground. In contrast to most other Romance languages, ‘believe’ commonly and prescriptively takes subjunctive in Italian, though indicative is found as well, and as has been observed in the literature, the choice of indicative or subjunctive has semantic effects. We show that the indicative with ‘believe’ is used when the belief statement describes the personal mental state of the holder of the attitude, an interpretation that follows from the traditional Hintikkean semantics. In contrast, we show that subjunctive with ‘believe’ is used to mark a relation between the content of belief and the discourse context. To analyze these facts, we propose that the modal quantification present in attitude reports comes not from the attitude verb, but instead from the embedded verbal mood. What differentiates Italian from related languages where ‘believe’ only takes indicative, is that Italian allows the subjunctive to access the com- mon ground as a modal base, utilizing the verb’s doxastic background as an ordering source. The fact that subjunctive relates the common ground to the subject’s beliefs explains the discourse oriented meaning of this combination. We extend our analysis to several other predicates that show mood variation in Italian.

How to theorize about subjective language: a lesson from ‘de re’

Subjective language has attracted substantial attention in the recent literature in formal semantics and philosophy of language (see overviews in MacFarlane in Assessment sensitivity: relative truth and its applications, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014; van Wijnbergen-Huitink, in Meier, and van Wijnbergen-Huitink (eds) Subjective meaning: alternatives to relativism, De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 1–19, 2016; Lasersohn in Subjectivity and perspective in truth-theoretic semantics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017; Vardomskaya in Sources of subjectivity, Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, IL, 2018; Zakkou in Faultless disagreement: a defense of contextualism in the realm of personal taste, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M., 2019b). Most current theories argue that Subjective Predicates (SPs), which express matters of opinion, semantically differ from ordinary predicates, which express matters of fact. We will call this view “SP exceptionalism”. This paper addresses SP exceptionalism by scrutinizing the behavior of SPs in attitude reports, which, as we will argue, significantly constrains the space of analytical options and rules out some of the existing theories. As first noticed by Stephenson (Linguist Philos 30(4):487–525, 2007a; Towards a theory of subjective meaning, Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2007b), the most prominent reading of embedded SPs is one where they talk about the attitude holder’s subjective judgment. As is remarked sometimes (Sæbø in Linguist Philos 32(4):327–352, 2009; Pearson in J Semant 30(1):103–154, 2013a), this reading is not the only one: embedded SPs may also talk about someone else’s, non-local, judgment. We concentrate specifically on such cases and show that non-local judgment is possible if and only if SPs are used within a DP that is outside main predicate position and that entire DP is read de re. We demonstrate that the behavior of SPs in attitude reports does not differ from that of ordinary predicates: it follows from general constraints on intersective modification and intensional quantification (Farkas in Szabolcsi (ed) Ways of scope taking, Springer, Dordrecht, pp 183–215, 1997; Musan in On the temporal interpretation of noun phrases, Garland, New York, 1997; Percus in Nat Lang Semant 8(3):173–229, 2000; Keshet in Good intensions: paving two roads to a theory of the de re/de dicto distinction, Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2008). We argue that this unexceptional behavior of SPs in fact has unexpected consequences for SP exceptionalism. Precisely because SPs have been argued to be semantically different from ordinary predicates, not all theories correctly predict these less-studied data: some overgenerate (e.g. Stephenson 2007a, b; Stojanovic in Linguist Philos 30(6):691–706, 2007; Sæbø 2009) and some undergenerate (e.g. McCready in McNally, and Puig-Waldmüller (ed) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, vol 11, pp 433–447, 2007; Pearson 2013a). Out of the currently available theories, only relativist accounts (Lasersohn in Linguist Philos 28(6):643–686, 2005; MacFarlane 2014; Bylinina in J Semant 34(2), 291–331, 2017; Coppock in Linguist Philos 41(2):125–164, 2018) predict the right interpretation, and only that interpretation. We thus present a novel empirical argument for relativism, and, more generally, formulate a constraint that has to be taken into consideration by any view that advocates SP exceptionalism.

ГЕНЕРАТОРЫ КОНЦЕПТОВ И ПРОБЛЕМА ЛОКАЛЬНОСТИ В СЕМАНТИКЕ ВЫСКАЗЫВАНИЙ ОБ УСТАНОВКАХ DE RE

This paper presents a design for an experimentum crucis as to the particular type of locality found with the binding of variables ranging over so-called concept generators in the compositional semantics of de re readings of attitude reports (Percus, Sauerland 2003). The outcome of the experiment would show whether Santorio’s (2014) formulation of the locality constraint is adequate. If it is not, this will affect his technical proposal. This paper presents an alternative proposal couched in terms of agreement and thus capable of capturing a more flexible, relative kind of locality. Статья посвящена формальному семантическому анализу высказываний о пропозициональных установках, интерпретируемых de re. Уже ставший традиционным анализ, использующий переменные по генераторам концептов (Percus, Sauerland 2003), перепорождает (Santorio 2014); мы описываем способ, каким можно проверить, адекватно ли требование локальности означивания этих переменных, сформулированное П. Санторио. В случае отрицательного результата альтернативная формализация, предложенная Санторио, окажется неадекватной. Мы предлагаем ещё одно решение, основанное на комбинации согласования (в смысле генеративистской теории признаков) и семантики альтернатив и предсказывающее относительную, а не абсолютную локальность.

Situation types in complementation: Oromo attitude predication

Though languages show rich variation in the clausal embedding strategies employed in attitude reports, most mainstream formal semantic theories of attitudes assume that the clausal complement of an attitude verb contributes at least a proposition to the semantics. The goal of this paper is to contribute to the growing cross-linguistic perspective of attitudes by providing semantic analyses for the two embedding strategies found with attitude verbs in Oromo (Cushitic): verbal nominalization, and embedding under akka 'as'. We argue that Oromo exemplifies a system in which non-speech attitudes uniformly embed situations rather than propositions, thereby expanding the empirical landscape of attitude reports in two ways: (i) situations and propositions are both ontological primitives used by languages in the construction of attitude reports, and (ii) attitude verbs in languages like Oromo do the semantic heavy lifting, contributing the "proposition" to propositional attitudes.

Truthmaker semantics for natural language: Attitude verbs, modals, and intensional transitive verbs

This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. The semantics is applied to factive verbs and response-stance verbs as well as to cases of modal concord. The paper also presents new motivations for ‘object-based truthmaker semantics’ from intensional transitive verbs such as need, look for, own, and buy and gives an outline of their semantics based on a further development of truthmaker semantics.