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

Epistemic modals, deduction, and factivity: new insights from the epistemic future

The epistemic future (e.g., the epistemic uses of English will) is often analyzed on a par with epistemic must. We provide novel empirical evidence from English and Romanian in deduction and factive contexts to argue that this identical treatment is not warranted. We propose a unified solution based on novel ways to (i) look at weakness in must and will and (ii) encode the factive presupposition when the complement of the factive is a modalized proposition (an interaction that, to our knowledge, has not been analyzed formally before). The account connects to existing debates on strength in necessity modals, on epistemic future and future tense, and on the embedding of epistemic (and other flavor) modals under attitudes

Evidentials are syntax-sensitive: The view from Bangla

This paper studies an evidential in Bangla which changes its evidential flavor based on its syntactic position. Forging novel connections with the literature on finiteness, indexical shift, and complementizer agreement, this paper demonstrates how evidentials can be sensitive to the presence of syntactic heads that represent the point-of-view of an utterance. Three main claims are made: (i) evidentials always take finite clauses which are perspective-sensitive, (ii) this perspective-sensitivity is syntactic, i.e. it is the result of control by speech-act heads, (iii) coindexation or contraindexation among these perspectival heads can have very important effects on word order in evidential constructions. This paper thus offers a comprehensive 'syntactic 'profile of evidential particles, which have generally been investigated with regard to their semantic-pragmatic contribution, arguing that the structural configurations these elements appear in have undeniably crucial effects on the interpretative component

Epistemic modals, deduction, and factivity: New insights from the epistemic future

International audienceThe epistemic future (e.g., the epistemic uses of English will) is often analyzed on a par with epistemic must. We provide novel empirical evidence from English and Romanian in deduction and factive contexts to argue that this identical treatment is not warranted. We propose a unified solution based on novel ways to (i) look at weakness in must and will and (ii) encode the factive presupposition when the complement of the factive is a modalized proposition (an interaction that, to our knowledge, has not been analyzed formally before). The account connects to existing debates on strength in necessity modals, on epistemic future and future tense, and on the embedding of epistemic (and other flavor) modals under attitudes

Questioning speech acts

The function of mapping from the semantic content of an utterance to its convention of use (a division of labor first made by Frege (1956)) has been attributed to abstract speech act operators (also known as force operators), such as ASSERT, QUESTION, and COMMAND. These operators have been traditionally assumed to occupy the highest echelons of the clausal periphery. The precise formulation of these operators has attracted a lot of attention from semanticists, as they are crucial for formalizing the diverse discourse functions of speech acts (Farkas and Bruce, 2009; Farkas and Roelofsen, 2017; Malamud and Stepheson, 2015; Krifka, 2015). These high operators usually come packaged with two assumptions: i) they are not embeddable under other elements, and ii) they belong to the realm of pure pragmatics and not compositional semantics. Recent research in both semantics and syntax have challenged these assumptions (Krifka, 2015; Davis, 2011; Wiltschko, 2017; Heim et al., 2016). Based on evidence from a language with a rich array of sentence-final particles (SFPs), Cantonese, we argue in this paper that not only are abstract speech operators embeddable, it is also the case that we need compositional mechanisms in these high regions of the clause. We will investigate the SFP stacking phenomenon, and argue that such grammaticalized operations on speech act operators reveal the need for a system that can compose the content of an utterance with multiple particles that update the discourse in a number of different, non-trivial ways