UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation explores, through three case studies, the relationship between the lexical semantics of clausal embedding (CE) predicates, and the syntactic and pragmatic restrictions on their complements, such as the (in)ability of certain predicates to embed declarative clauses or nominal expressions. I propose that these restrictions arise from interactions between fine-grained aspects of predicate meaning and the linguistic environment in which those predicates occur, rather than being stipulated into predicates' lexical entries via restrictions on permissible semantic types or semantic categories of their arguments (e.g. Grimshaw 1979, Pesetsky 1982, 1991) or resulting from polysemy or ambiguity of CE predicates (e.g. George 2011). First, I examine the Estonian verb mõtlema, which has a believe-like interpretation with an embedded declarative, and a wonder-like interpretation with embedded declaratives. I show that this behavior can be derived straightforwardly only if declaratives and interrogatives are typewise identical, i.e. sets of sets of worlds (Hamblin 1973, Ciardelli et al. 2013), and \textit{mõtlema} denotes an ontologically primitive attitude of 'contemplation'. Second, I analyze the behavior of English believe, which cannot embed interrogatives except under a combination of modal and nonveridical operators, such as can't. I propose that the apparent 'lifting' of selectional restrictions of believe in some contexts, as well as other unexpected properties of the can't believe construction, can be understood compositionally: believe can in fact compose with interrogative clauses in principle, but doing so normally results in systematically trivial meanings (Theiler et al. 2019). By placing believe under the right combination of operators, this triviality can be obviated (see Mayr 2019). Finally, I develop a semantic account of verbs like believe and trust, which can embed variety of nominal expressions alongside clauses, posing a compositional puzzle (Djärv 2019). I propose that these predicates are a kind of weak response-stance predicates (Cattell 1978), in that they presuppose an evidential source of the relevant attitude, which can be spelled out as a direct object. I take this to suggest a tight link between argument structure of belief predicates and their external syntactic distribution.