Attitude Verbs Research Articles

A semantic universal for modality

This paper articulates a new semantic universal for modal expressions in natural language, dubbed the Independence of Force and Flavor (IFF). This property accommodates counterexamples to Nauze 2008’s proposed universal from variable-force variable-flavor modals (Bochnak 2015a,b) and attitude verbs (Močnik & Abramovitz 2019), while still ruling out unattested modals. It may also be seen as a form of convexity applied to modals. EARLY ACCESS

Wishing, Decision Theory, and Two-Dimensional Content

This paper is about two requirements on wish reports whose interaction motivates a novel semantics for these ascriptions. The first requirement concerns the ambiguities that arise when determiner phrases, such as definite descriptions, interact with ‘wish’. More specifically, several theorists have recently argued that attitude ascriptions featuring counterfactual attitude verbs license interpretations on which the determiner phrase is interpreted relative to the subject’s beliefs. The second requirement involves the fact that desire reports in general require decision-theoretic notions for their analysis. The current study is motivated by the fact that no existing account captures both of these aspects of wishing. I develop a semantics for wish reports that makes available belief-relative readings but also allows decision-theoretic notions to play a role in shaping the truth conditions of these ascriptions. The general idea is that we can analyze wishing in terms of a two-dimensional notion of expected utility.

Парадигма неизосемических высказываний с семантикой качественной характеризации как пример асимметрии синтаксического знака

Expressive expressions of qualitative characterization as non-isosemic constructions coincide in form with existential sentences. Existential construction is used metaphorically: gde est’ chto (existence) → v kom / chem est’ kakoy-to priznak (qualitative characterization), formed by non-isosemic filling of its positions. Thus, the lexeme of locative semantics is replaced by a combination v kom / v chem (in whom/in what), with the possible choice of prepositional-case forms limited to the only form of the prepositional case with the preposition v (in). The subject and predicate positions in isosemic and non-isosemic existential structures are replaced by words of different denotative classes. In the sentences of existence, the subject is expressed by nouns, denoting objects of an external, sensually perceived world. The sentences of qualitative characterization have their subject position occupied by words of qualitative semantics denoting distinctive, permanent qualities, resulting in the semantics of existence drifting towards qualitative characterization. Thus, the verb est’ (to be) as the predicate of existence does not literally express existence but performs a service function. Unlike the isosemic existential constructions, non-isosemic constructions of qualitative characterization lack variation in person and number, with the isosemic verb position being obligatory and the structure having a non-variative form. Non-isosemic expressions have additional semantic components: non-categorical designation of a feature, uncertainty of the author of the statement about the characteristics of the subject, and low trait manifestation degree. With certain restrictions on how the subject and predicate positions are filled, the non-isosemic structure features additional meanings: modus, evaluative, expressive, intensity values, etc.

Attitude reports without complementation: The case of Amahuaca

Classic analyses of propositional attitude reports assume that attitude verbs compose with a clausal argument that expresses a proposition. I use original fieldwork data to demonstrate that Amahuaca (Panoan; Peru) attitude reports involve high adjunct switch-reference clauses rather than clausal complements to an attitude verb. This structure raises issues for the traditionally assumed compositional semantics of attitude reports. I present two potential analyses that do not require the verb to compose directly with a complement CP, ultimately arguing in favor of an analysis that aligns with proposals by Kratzer (2006) and Moulton (2015) that the internal arguments of attitude verbs are individuals with propositional content. Amahuaca therefore provides novel empirical support for this approach to the semantics of attitude reports.

The selectional variability of 'imagine whether'

White (2021) has observed that some clause-embedding predicates (esp. doxastic attitude verbs like believe, non-veridical preferential predicates like hope) vary w.r.t. their selection properties: While these predicates commonly combine with declarative complements, they sometimes accept interrogative complements. My paper notes a similar selectional variability for fiction verbs like imagine: while imagine is typically taken to reject polar interrogative complements, some uses of imagine whether are acceptable. Curiously, this acceptability cannot be explained through the techniques (e.g., highlighting, no presupposition, multiple senses) that have recently been used to explain the acceptability of believe and hope whether. To still account for the ability of imagine to take whether-complements, I draw on recent work on attitudinal parasitism (see Blumberg 2019). This work assumes that some cases of imagination depend, for their reference, on the objects of another experience (e.g. visual perception). My semantics holds that imagine whether is felicitous only when the truth of the embedded TP is decided at the possible world of which the experienced scene is a spatio-temporal part. This condition is more easily satisfied when the verb in the TP has future tense (will), or when imagine is embedded under a negated ability modal or under try.

A Stylistic Approach to Qur’ānic Prepositions Preceding Some Verbs Irregularly

Verbs in Arabic Language are used with specific prepositions; each preposition is called sila for the verb it precedes to. There are different opinions of Qur’ānic exaggerators, commentators and the rest of scholars towards these prepositions when it comes along with the non-dedicated verb in Arabic language. Is it originated or replaced with the other one, if not replaced, then, what does it mean there? Sometimes many of them used the term. There are two major parts of the usage of prepositions, i.e.1) Rhetoric 2) Syntax. In these two most familiar fields, prepositions always stand for a specific function. Rhetorically, it refers to the meaning same as of meaning under the term of metaphor, majāz, allegory, symbolism and simile. While in syntax, it clears the position of verb and helps it out in giving the required meaning accordingly as it occurs grammatically. This research intends to discuss this stylistic, rhetoric and syntax approach in detail through conducting an empirical study of some specific Qur’ānic prepositions appeared after some verbs they are not used with regularly.

Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping.

Words have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word's meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via syntactic bootstrapping.But while formal theories argue for principled links between meaning and syntax, actual syntactic evidence about meaning is noisy and highly abstract. This paper examines the role that syntactic bootstrapping can play in learning modal and attitude verb meanings, for which the physical context is especially uninformative. I argue that abstract syntactic classifications are useful to the child, but that something further is both necessary and available. I examine how pragmatic and syntactic cues can combine in mutually constraining ways to help learners infer attitude meanings, but need to be supplemented by semantic information from the lexical context in the case of modals.

The quantity adjectiveduōin Chinese and the event quantity construction

AbstractIn theduōevent quantity construction,duō‘much’ is a quantity adjective. Whatduō‘much’ modifies is the root of the verb and the root has to move to the light verb position to be categorically defined. The quantity adjectiveduō‘much’ functions to introduce a measure function which measures the event denoted by the verb along the dimension valued by the assignment functionA, and the domain to which the measure function applies must be monotonic. So, the ‘modification’ relation between the quantity adjectiveduō‘much’ and its modifyee essentially differs from that between a typical gradable adjective liketián‘sweat’ and its modifyee. This explains how the quantity adjectiveduō‘much’ differs from the typical adjective in syntax and semantics.

Use of posture verbs in old Lithuanian writings: A case study of the verb gulėti ‘lieʼ

This paper reports on constructions with the posture verb gulėti ʻlieʼ in religious Lithuanian writings of the 16th–19th centuries. The aim of the current study is to offer an overview of the use of these constructions and their grammaticalization potential in the old Lithuanian language. 662 samples were selected from “Evangelijos bei Epistolos” by Bartholomäus Willent, “Ewangelie Polskie y Litewskie” by Jonas Jaknavičius, “Naujos maldų knygelės” and “Naujos giesmių knygos” by Daniel Klein, Johann Jakob Quandt’s Bible and “Naujas įstatymas” by Juozapas Arnulfas Giedraitis. The website “Senieji raštai” (“The old Lithuanian writings”) of the Research Centre of Written Heritage, the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, was utilised to explore the old writings; the constructions were extracted using the search engine of the website. To analyse the semantics of these constructions, the FrameNet system was used. First, the theoretical approach of this study is discussed, and the sources and methods applied are indicated, then, the semantic analysis of the posture verb gulėti ʻlieʼ is presented and finally, its grammaticalization potential is examined, followed by conclusions.

In the thick of it: scope rivalry in past counterfactuals of Pomerano

This paper analyzes the morphosyntactic variation in past counterfactuals with modal verbs in Pomerano, a Low German variety spoken in Brazil. The variation concerns (i) the highest verb (temporal auxiliary or modal verb), (ii) the morphological form of the temporal auxiliary (blocking of tense and/or person agreement), (iii) the frequently unexpected position of the modal verb (verb clusters in the CP-domain), and (iv) the overall number of verbs (syntactic doubling and/or PF-insertion). Analyzing more than 6,000 translated sentences, scope rivalry between the temporal auxiliary and the modal verb proves to be the major catalyst of an intriguing instance of language variation and change. The derivation of the extant variants grants us a privileged view of the clausal architecture of Pomerano—including cases of derivational misfiring—as well as of more general processes of clause formation.

The diachronic evolution of posture verbs in Chinese

Abstract The linguistic properties of the three most common verbs of posture, which express positions, such as zuò ‘sit’, zhàn ‘stand’, tǎng ‘lie’ have been thoroughly studied in a wide range of languages belonging to typologically different language families, but they have never been extensively investigated in Chinese. Our article traces the diachrony of these verbs from the Archaic Chinese period (5th - 2nd centuries BCE, corresponding to the Classical Chinese by excellence) to the present-day Chinese, showing that they have very rarely been grammaticalized into aspect markers, as has been the case in other languages. We also examine the semantic distinction between the expression of a dynamic vs. static action, as well as the syntactic behavior of these positional verbs. We finally discuss their links with locative / existential verbs from the Early Medieval Chinese onwards (3rd c. CE) and the grammaticalization path that has been hypothesized according to which the posture verbs have been first reanalyzed into locative/existential verbs before being grammaticalized into aspectual markers will be tested.

How to obtain a copula from a process verb: Insights from the event structure of posture verbs

Posture verbs (sit, stand, lie) seem to constitute an aspectual class of their own, as they do not readily fit the description of either states or activities. The contradicting results obtained from applying various diagnostic tests, which group posture verbs with either states or activities depending on the test’s sensitivity, have led to the creation of additional classes of states, namely, interval states (Dowty 1979) and Davidsonian states (Maienborn 2005), to account for the particular nature of the events denoted by these verbs. These approaches leave unanswered why equivalent verbs such as sentar ‘sit’ in Spanish, a Romance language, but also setzen ‘sit’ in German, a Germanic language, cannot denote stationary motion by themselves. This paper proposes that it is not necessary to introduce additional types of events to account for the lexical aspectual properties of posture verbs in English. Instead, it is their basic aspectual make-up, that is, their having a single process subevent (procP) (Ramchand 2008), and the labile nature of English that can explain their recalcitrant properties and the cross-linguistic issues they raise, while at the same time offering a seamless explanation for the propensity of posture verbs to become copulas cross-linguistically.

Exploring the conceptualisation of locative events in French, English, and Dutch: Insights from eye-tracking on two memorisation tasks

Abstract The present study addresses the influence of language on the conceptualisation of locative events (e.g., the bottle on the table) in French, English, and Dutch which differ greatly in their habitual encoding of locative events. Dutch obligatorily expresses the disposition of the Figure (viz. the bottle) via a Cardinal Posture Verb (CPV) like liggen ‘lie’, staan ‘stand’, or zitten ‘sit’. In French, the preferred locative marker is the neutral copula être ‘be’ which leaves dispositional nuances habitually unexpressed. English straddles the middle: while the neutral copula be is usually preferred, the CPVs are sometimes found because of diachronic reasons. Our study assesses the potential repercussions of these cross-linguistic differences on the perception of locative events via a recognition task involving eye-tracking and is run in a non-verbal and a verbal condition. Our findings show that, irrespective of the condition, recognition performance is affected by the linguistic preferences, which confirms the permanent effect of language on thought even beyond verbal contexts. The analysis of eye-movements corroborates this finding: depending on their language, the participants attend to the stimuli differently. In the verbal condition, language is used as a strategic tool to enhance memorisation and the participants’ eye-movements still reflect cross-linguistic differences.

Children’s Use of English Articles in Intransitive and Transitive Sentences

This study presents new evidence that young children use English articles in an adult-like fashion, suggesting that children seem to know the function of English articles from the earliest observable ages. In adult language, indefinite NPs tend to appear in the subject position of intransitive verbs and the object position of transitive verbs. The study analyzes children’s early speech data for this pattern. The data consist of speech samples from six children, with mean lengths of utterances ranging from 2.0 to 3.1, and speech samples from six adults to provide a benchmark. The results demonstrate that in the data from both the adults and children, indefinite NPs with indefinite articles tend to appear in the subject position of intransitive verbs and the object position of transitive verbs, suggesting that very young children can use articles in similar patterns to those of adults.

What embedded counterfactuals tell us about the semantics of attitudes.

We discuss German examples where counterfactuals restricting an epistemic modal are embedded under glauben ‘believe’. Such sentences raise a puzzle for the analysis of counterfactuals, modals, and belief attributions within possible-worlds semantics. Their truth conditions suggest that the modal’s domain is determined exclusively by the subject’s belief state, but evaluating the counterfactual separately at each of the subject’s doxastic alternatives does not yield the correct quantificational domain: the domain ends up being determined by the facts of each particular world, which include propositions the subject does not believe. We therefore revise the semantics of counterfactuals: counterfactuals still rely on an ordering among worlds that can be derived from a premise set (Kratzer, Angelika. 1978. Semantik der Rede: Kontexttheorie – Modalwörter – Konditionalsätze (Monographien Linguistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft 38). Königstein: Scriptor, 2012 [1981]a. The notional category of modality. In Modals and conditionals (Oxford studies in theoretical linguistics 36), 27–69. Oxford: Oxford University Press), but rather than uniquely characterizing a world, this premise set can be compatible with multiple worlds. In belief contexts, the attitude subject’s belief state as a whole determines the relevant ordering. This, in turn, motivates a revision of the semantics of believe: following Yalcin’s work on epistemic modals (Yalcin, Seth. 2007. Epistemic modals. Mind 116. 983–1026), we submit that evaluation indices are complex, consisting of a world and an ordering among worlds. Counterfactuals are sensitive to the ordering component of an index. Attitude verbs shift both components, relativizing the ordering to the attitude subject.

Sequence of tense and cessation implicatures: evidence from Polish

In English, past tense stative clauses embedded under a past-marked attitude verb, like Eric thought that Kalina was sick, can receive two interpretations, differing on when the state of the complement is understood to hold, i.e. Kalina’s sickness precedes the time of Eric’s thinking (backward-shifted reading), or Kalina is sick at the time of Eric’s thinking (simultaneous reading). As is well known, the availability of the simultaneous reading—also called Sequence of tense (SOT)—is subject to cross-linguistic variation. Non-SOT languages only allow for the backward-shifted interpretation. This cross-linguistic variation has been analysed in two main ways in the literature: a structural approach, connecting the availability of the simultaneous reading in a language to a syntactic mechanism that allows the embedded past not to be interpreted; and an implicature approach, which links the absence of such a reading to the presence of a “cessation” implicature associated with past tense. We report a series of experiments on Polish, which is commonly classified as a non-SOT language. First, we investigate the interpretation of complement clauses embedded under past-marked attitude verbs in Polish and English. This investigation revealed a difference between these two languages in the availability of simultaneous interpretations for past-under-past complement clauses, albeit not as large as a binary distinction between SOT and non-SOT languages would lead us to expect. We then address the question of whether the lower acceptability we observe for simultaneous readings in Polish might be due to an embedded cessation implicature. On the way to address this question, we show that in simple matrix clauses, Polish gives rise to the same cessation inference as English. Then we investigate Polish past-under-past sentences in positive and negative contexts, comparing their potential cessation implicature to the exclusive implicature of disjunction. In our results, we found that the latter was endorsed more often in positive than in negative contexts, as expected, while the cessation implicature was endorsed overall very little, with no difference across contexts. The disanalogy between the disjunction and the temporal cases, and the insensitivity of the latter to monotonicity, are a challenge for the implicature approach, and cast doubts on associating SOT phenomena with implicatures.

Extraposition in River Plate Spanish. A case of clausal doubling?

This paper explores a set of constructions from River Plate Spanish in which propositional attitude verbs occur both with a third person feminine accusative clitic and a CP in final position (e.g., No me la esperaba que hiciera tanto frío, ‘I didn’t expect it to be so cold’). The data under analysis, which resemble the well-studied phenomenon of extraposition in English (Jespersen 1933, Postal & Pullum 1988, Rosenbaum 1967, Rothstein 1995, 2004, etc.), have not so far received much attention in the study of Spanish syntax. Our conclusion is that the ‘extraposed’ CPs do not constitute cases of right dislocation or right-adjunction but clear instances of clausal doubling, analogous to the well-known process of clitic doubling with accusative DPs characteristic of Argentine Spanish (e.g., Lo vi a Gonzalo, ‘I saw Gonzalo’). Along the lines of Rothstein (1995, 2004), we argue that the mechanism for licensing the CP is predication and we provide evidence against the hypothesis that the clitic is an object expletive.

Emotional Attractors in Subject-Verb Number Agreement.

Considering the crosstalk between brain networks that contain linguistic and emotional information and that no studies have examined the impact of semantic information of affective nature on subject-verb number agreement, the present Event Related Potential (ERP) study investigated the extent to which emotional local nouns whose number mismatched that of subject head nouns might be considered by the parser during comprehension of grammatically correct sentences. To this end, twenty-eight Spanish native speakers were tested on a self-paced reading task while their brain activity was recorded. The experimental materials consisted of 120 sentences where the valence (negative vs. neutral) and number (singular vs. plural) of the local noun of the singular subject noun-phrase (NP) were manipulated; El gorro de aquel/aquellos cazador(es)/mecánico(s) era… [The hat of that/those hunter(s)/mechanic(s) was…]. ERP results measured in the local noun position showed that valence and number interacted in the 300–500 ms (negative component) and 780–880 ms (late positivity) time windows. In the (target) verb position, the two factors only interacted in the late 780–880 ms time window, revealing an “ungrammatical illusion” for plural marked neutral words. Our findings suggest that number agreement is sensitive to affective meaning but that the emotional information of an attractor is considered in different operations and at different stages during grammatical sentence processing; it can affect lexical and syntactic representation retrieval of a subject-NP and impact agreement encoding only at late stages of processing, during verb agreement and feature integration.

Les verbes de posture en ese ejja: Un système de classificateurs verbaux

Abstract Ese Ejja is an Amazonian language spoken in Peru and Bolivia. It possesses four posture verbs that appear in multiple constructions to express location, possession, existence, imperfective aspect and present tense. Firstly, the article examines the criteria for associating these verbs (be they grammaticalized or not) to the animate or inanimate entities. These criteria are not necessarily linked directly to posture, be it real or prototypical for a given entity, but may involve the sex of the entity, or even to the place where the entity is located. Secondly, it argues that the Ese Ejja posture verbs are better analyzed as verbal classifiers rather than classificatory verbs, as they participate in a number of constructions spanning the continuum from purely lexical to entirely grammatical ones, using the same semantic criteria.

The accusative/genitive alternation in Bosnian/ Croatian/Serbian

There is an ongoing discussion in the literature on how the meaning conveyed by (in)definite determiners is expressed in languages which lack an (in)definite article system (see e.g., Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004; Deal 2017). One proposal is that in Slavic languages the meaning conveyed by (in)definite determiners is expressed by case markers (e.g., Kagan 2007; Khrizman 2014; Borschev et al. 2008). In particular, the observation was that in the case of the accusative/ genitive alternation, the accusative is associated with the meaning conveyed by definites, while the genitive case is associated with the meaning conveyed by indefinites. We tested this observation in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) focusing on the alternation of the accusative with the partitive genitive in the direct object position of transitive verbs. The results of our research show that whereas the accusative conveys the inferences of maximality and weak familiarity of the discourse referent, the genitive case does not. We propose that the partitive genitive in BCS presupposes proper partitivity. The inferences of the accusative, on the other hand, arise as implicated anti-presuppositions yielded by the competition with the partitive genitive.