Modelling Selectional Super-Flexibility

The selectional flexibility of some attitude verbs (e.g. know, realize, report) between declarative and interrogative complements has been the subject of much recent work in formal semantics. However, little attention has been paid to verbs (e.g. see, remember, observe) that embed an even wider variety of complements (incl. subject-controlled gerundive small clauses and concrete object-denoting DPs). Since the familiar types of some of these complements resist an embedding in the type for questions [= sets of propositions], these verbs challenge Theiler, Roelofsen & Aloni’s (2018) uniform interpretation strategy for the complements of responsive verbs. My paper answers this challenge by uniformly interpreting the different complements of selectionally super-flexible verbs like remember in a generalized type for questions, viz. as parametrized centered questions. It shows that the resulting semantics captures the intuitive entailment pattern of these verbs.

Clausal embedding in Washo: Complementation vs. modification

This paper concerns clausal embedding in Washo (also spelled Washoe, Wáˑšiw), a highly endangered Hokan/isolate language spoken around Lake Tahoe in the United States. We argue that Washo offers evidence that both complementation and modification are available strategies for subordination, and in doing so contribute more generally to the ongoing debate about how clauses are embedded by attitude verbs. We observe that the embedding strategies of certain predicates in Washo follow from independent properties of clause types in the language. On the one hand, clauses embedded by presuppositional verbs come in the form of clausal nominalizations, which are selected as thematic internal arguments. The DP layer in these complements is responsible for encoding familiarity in a general sense (along the lines of Kastner 2015) both in these complement clauses as well as in other constructions in the language. On the other hand, clauses embedded by non-presuppositional verbs are not selected at all; they are instead adjunct modifiers, which follows from the fact that the attitude verbs they modify are always intransitive. This aspect of the analysis lends support to the property-analysis of ‘that’-clauses (e.g., Kratzer 2006; Moulton 2009; Elliott 2016), but only in certain instances of embedding. We argue that the Washo facts show that selection still plays a role for some verbs, contra theories that do away with it altogether (Elliott 2016), but selection cannot explain everything either, as non-presuppositional verbs are intransitive and do not select at all.

On the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs

Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few case studies, we show how children make use of syntactic and pragmatic cues to figure out attitude verb meanings and how their successes, and even their mistakes, reveal remarkable conceptual, linguistic, and pragmatic sophistication. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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.

A Compositional Pluralist Semantics for Extensional and Attitude Verbs

We propose a new account of linguistic content that reconciles content-pluralism with compositionality. This is achieved by integrating truth-conditional content and attitude report content into a single notion of content. A parametrized version of this notion (with parameters for agents, times, and information states) serves as input to the compositional semantic machinery. By supplying different parameter-values to the parametrized contents of their complements, different verbs select for different components of the complement’s integrated content. The resulting account explains the different substitution properties of extensional and attitude constructions and captures the role of agents’ epistemicperspective in the determination of attitude content. The account improves upon other accounts of truth-conditional and attitude content (esp. two-dimensional semantics) by interpreting different occurrences of an expression—in extensional and in attitude embeddings—as objects of the same semantic type, and by explaining the substitution-resistance of attitudinal embeddings of extensional constructions.

On Single and Two-Tiered Approaches to Control

In his most recent work, Landau suggests that control in impersonal passive constructions is cross-linguistically limited to attitude verbs and argues that this universal restriction offers convincing support for his two-tiered theory of control (TTC) over his earlier “single tier” Agree-based model. This paper further examines sentences involving control and passivization and argues that improved empirical coverage is achieved in this area by a single-tier Agree approach to control, one fundamentally different from Landau’s earlier analysis in its extension to control Reuland’s proposals reducing binding phenomena to Agree.

Frege and saving substitution

Goodman and Lederman (Philos Stud 177(4):947–952, 2020) argue that the traditional Fregean strategy for preserving the validity of Leibniz’s Law of substitution fails when confronted with apparent counterexamples involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs. We argue, on the contrary, that the Fregean strategy succeeds and that Goodman and Lederman’s argument misfires.

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.