From modal logic to event semantics

Attitude predicates–words which describe mental states like believe, know, and want–sit at the crossroads of many topics in natural language semantics, including modality, event structure, and lexical semantics, and often express rich, intricate meanings. This course examines how to represent the semantics of attitude predicates, with the goal of building the foundation to understand current developments in the field. In particular, we will zoom in on two major influential treatments: the classical view of attitudes as modal operators (Hintikka 1962, 1969, et seq.) and more recent theories treating attitudes as predicates of eventualities (Kratzer 2006; Moulton 2009, 2015; Elliott 2019, a.o.). We will examine how these competing accounts handle a range of empirical phenomena, including de re/de dicto readings, the ability of some predicates to combine with both declarative and interrogative clauses, and the encoding of inferences like factivity and neg-raising. We will conclude by examining some open issues in the semantics of attitudes, including whether the grammar renders certain plausible attitude meanings ‘impossible’ to lexicalize (e.g., the idea that there are no contra-factive predicates), the role of lexical aspect in clause embedding, and how data from understudied languages has challenged old generalizations.

Level: intermediate