The Event Structure of Attitudes

This dissertation focuses on what it means to think that or to think whether something is the case. First, I show that the type of clause that think combines with makes a difference in the kind of attitude a thought report ascribes, and in the kind of eventuality that it describes. With a declarative complement, think entails belief and introduces an eventuality description that may (but need not be) stative. With a question complement, think introduces an eventuality description that is necessarily dynamic, and often deliberative. In this case, there is no entailment of belief, but one of agnosticism and curiosity about the answer to the embedded question. This, and a second generalization that governs the attitude related and the aspectual properties of think that and of think whether hold cross-linguistically. Second, I attempt to square the observation that think whether is grammatical and necessarily dynamic with two recent proposals that predict that think should be ungrammatical with embedded questions (Mayr, 2019; Theiler et al., 2019). As these go, the excluded middle presupposition, which is associated with think to derive neg(ative)-raising with declaratives, gives rise to an anomalous meaning with embedded questions, which is perceived as ungrammaticality. I argue that question embedding and neg-raising do exclude each other, pace White (accepted), but that this is because the former requires think to introduce a dynamic description, and the latter requires a stative one (Xiang, 2013; Bervoets, 2014, 2020). I stress that think whether is often unacceptable in the sentence frames in which we have been trying to observe it—for example, with the verb in the present simple—but argue that such restrictions are reducible for the most part to interpretive restrictions on dynamic predicates in those frames. Third, we need to derive the attitude related and the aspectual alternations that think gives rise to with declarative and question complements. I propose that think’s attitude component encodes the entertain modality from inquisitive semantics (Ciardelli and Roelofsen, 2015, a.o.), which is equivalent to belief in the declarative case and compatible with an inquisitive attitude in the quesvi tion case. Turning to the aspectual alternation, I propose to structure attitude eventualities with embedded clause denotations by relating subeventualities of the former and the alternatives provided by the latter. Declaratives provide a single alternative, which makes it possible to construct a divisive (hence stative) predicate. Questions, on the other hand, provide multiple alternatives, which forces think whether to introduce a non-divisive (hence non-stative) predicate. Finally, I sketch out some ways in which attitude predicates vary in terms of their attitude related and lexical aspectual properties. I ask whether believe that and believe wh- could be given a treatment similar to think. I point out that there are predicates like know, remember and agree that may or must remain stative in question embedding, and speculate whether presupposing truth or belief might be enabling this option. I end with a typology of predicates that should all be possible if the stative/dynamic alternation seen for think were free, observe that many are missing and characterize the ones that are

Potential answer readings expected, missing

In Turkish, some attitude reports alternate in veridicality with embedded declaratives. These, however, are uniformly veridical with embedded questions, but given a generalization due to Spector and Egré (2015), we expect them to alternate there as well. I present this puzzle of the missing potential answer reading and argue that two known restrictions on the distribution of embedded questions do not account for it, namely one based on non-veridicality simpliciter, and the other, on neg-raising

Two question-embedding strategies and answer-orientedness

Japanese and Turkish attitude predicates combine with two main kinds of embedded clauses: Nominalizations, and clauses introduced by the morphemes to and diye. We describe their interrogative variants, showing that nominalizations give rise to answer-oriented inferences with responsive predicates (e.g., factivity, belief), but that diye/to interrogatives are question-oriented and entail that the attitude holder linguistically produces the interrogative. We propose a compositional fragment where attitude predicates take nominalizations as arguments, which they may impose semantic restrictions on, and where diye/to-clauses modify and enrich attitude meanings with a linguistic production inference

Event plurality & quantifier scope across clause boundaries

Legend has it that quantifiers cannot scope out of finite clauses. But whileislands for quantifier raising might exist, finite clauses are not that: We identifya novel environment which productively facilitates scoping universal quantifiersout of embedded clauses, involving the manipulation of event structure. With thehelp of the perfect on an embedding verb and certain adverbials that presuppose abuildup towards a result state (by noon, eventually, at long last), embedded universalquantifiers can more readily take extrawide scope. We describe, account for, anddiscuss restrictions to this effect, and conclude that scoping quantifiers out of finiteclauses is not banned by syntactic constraints, although context or processing mightfavor narrow scope readings

The Somali Microscope: Personal Pronouns, Determiners and Possession

This paper describes aspects of the morpho-syntax and the semantics of lexical nouns, pronouns, and possessives in Somali, with a focus on the expression of (in)definiteness. Novel data supports the claim that nominals marked with morphemes -KA and -KII, thought to be overt definite determiners, indeed pattern like definite descriptions. The core contribution is that there are nominals that do not bear -KA or -KII, which are interpreted as definites. Therefore, a phonologically null, definiteness encoding device must be available in Somali, either alongside, or instead of the morphemes -KA and -KII

A crosslinguistic database for combinatorial and semantic properties of attitude predicates

We introduce a crosslinguistic database for attitude predicates, which references their combinatorial (syntactic) and semantic properties. Our data allows assessment of crosslinguistic generalizations about attitude predicates as well as discovery of new typological/crosslinguistic patterns. This paper highlights empirical andtheoretical issues that our database will help to address, motivates the predicate sample and the properties that it references, as well as our methodological choices. Two case studies illustrate how the database can be used to assess the validity of crosslinguistic generalizations

Investigation of the Effect of Contextual Factors on BIN Production in AAE

Treatments of African American English (AAE) in the literature have focused primarily on morphosyntactic differences from mainstream American English. One these differences is found in the tense and aspect system. While both dialects have the present perfect use for “been”, AAE also has a stressed variant of “been”, termed BIN. This aspectual marker is featured in the literature, but the main focus has been on its prosodic qualities. It differs from present perfect been in that it has the semantics of a remote past marker (Rickford 1973, Rickford 1975, Green 1998). For a comprehensive understanding of AAE’s tense aspect system, both syntactic-semantic and discourse-pragmatic aspects of these markers need to be studied as well. We complete a production experiment with members of an AAE-speaking community in Southwest Louisiana followed by an acceptability judgement task. The purpose of the experiment is twofold. First, it allows us to examine BIN production in canonical BIN environments and non-BIN environments. Second, by paying close attention to the context these environments occur in, we can also examine the influence of discourse-pragmatic factors (LONG-TIME, TEMPORAL JUST, POLAR QUESTIONS) on BIN production in unambiguous environments, as well as in ambiguous environments. The factors LONG-TIME and TEMPORAL JUST are found to be significant predictors of BIN production Furthermore, there is a significant difference in ambiguity, such that the unambiguous contexts predicted BIN slightly less. Overall, the results of the experiment suggest that speakers are consistent in their BIN production for expected BIN environments, but more variable in the non-BIN environments for both unambiguous and ambiguous contexts. This raises the interesting question of why speakers are more variable in the non-BIN environments as well as questioning what the discourse-pragmatic factors are actually capturing. Together, however, it suggests that there are a variety of components that can influence BIN production. Future areas of work could further investigate in regards these components