Semantic Properties and Combinatorial Restrictions of Attitude Predicates

This course is about two types of properties of attitude predicates: combinatorial properties, i.e., the types of clauses they can be combined with, and semantic properties, e.g., veridicality, neg-raising, preferentiality, focus-sensitivity and event-structural properties. In particular, it concentrates on the extent to which the combinatorial properties can be explained by the semantic properties, a topic under active research with many established results and open empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues.
We present empirical generalizations and theoretical analyses in the literature, review recent debates about their validity, and discuss several refinements and extensions. In this process, we illustrate how experimental, corpus, as well as crosslinguistic data, when combined with insights from formal theoretical analyses, can deepen our understanding of the internal meaning components of attitude verbs and how these components give rise to certain syntactic patterns. The resulting analyses pave the way for uncovering novel syntactic-semantic universals for attitude verbs.

Course leader

Deniz Özyıldız and Ciyang Qing

Target group

Students