The Semantics of Opinion: Attitudes, Expression, Free Choice, and Negation PDF
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Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy 102 Melanie Bervoets The Semantics of Opinion Attitudes, Expression, Free Choice, and Negation Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy Volume 102 SeriesEditors CleoCondoravdi,StanfordUniversity,Stanford,CA,USA LouiseMcNally,PompeuFabraUniversity,Barcelona,Spain ZoltanSzabo,YaleUniversity,NewHaven,CT,USA EditorialBoardMembers JohanvanBentham,UniversityofAmsterdam,Amsterdam,TheNetherlands GregoryN.Carlson,UniversityofRochester,Rochester,NY,USA DavidDowty,TheOhioStateUniversity,Columbus,OH,USA GeraldGazdar,UniversityofSussex,Brighton,UK IreneHeim,MassachusettsInstituteofTechnology,Cambridge,MA,USA EwanKlein,ICCS,Edinburgh,UK BillLadusaw,CowellCollege,UniversityofCalifornia,SantaCruz,CA,USA TerrenceParsons,UniversityofCalifornia,Irvine,CA,USA Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy publishes monographs and edited volumes that focus on issues related to structure and meaning in natural language, as addressed in the semantics, philosophy of language, pragmatics and related disci- plines,inparticularthefollowingareas: • philosophical theories of meaning and truth, reference, description, entailment, presupposition,implicatures,context-dependence,andspeechacts (cid:129) linguistictheoriesofsemanticinterpretationinrelationtosyntacticstructureand prosody,ofdiscoursestructure,lexicalsemanticsandsemanticchange (cid:129) psycholinguistictheoriesofsemanticinterpretationandissuesoftheprocessing andacquisitionofnaturallanguage,andtherelationofsemanticinterpretationto othercognitivefaculties (cid:129) mathematical and logical properties of natural language and general aspects of computationallinguistics (cid:129) philosophicalquestionsraisedbylinguisticsasascience. ThisbookseriesisassociatedwiththejournalLinguisticsandPhilosophy:http:// www.springer.com/journal/10988 Moreinformationaboutthisseriesathttp://www.springer.com/series/6556 Melanie Bervoets The Semantics of Opinion Attitudes, Expression, Free Choice, and Negation 123 MelanieBervoets Toronto,ON,Canada ISSN0924-4662 ISSN2215-034X (electronic) StudiesinLinguisticsandPhilosophy ISBN978-94-024-1746-3 ISBN978-94-024-1747-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1747-0 ©SpringerNatureB.V.2020 Thisworkissubjecttocopyright.AllrightsarereservedbythePublisher,whetherthewholeorpartof thematerialisconcerned,specificallytherightsoftranslation,reprinting,reuseofillustrations,recitation, broadcasting,reproductiononmicrofilmsorinanyotherphysicalway,andtransmissionorinformation storageandretrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilarmethodology nowknownorhereafterdeveloped. Theuseofgeneraldescriptivenames,registerednames,trademarks,servicemarks,etc.inthispublication doesnotimply,evenintheabsenceofaspecificstatement,thatsuchnamesareexemptfromtherelevant protectivelawsandregulationsandthereforefreeforgeneraluse. Thepublisher,theauthors,andtheeditorsaresafetoassumethattheadviceandinformationinthisbook arebelievedtobetrueandaccurateatthedateofpublication.Neitherthepublishernortheauthorsor theeditorsgiveawarranty,expressorimplied,withrespecttothematerialcontainedhereinorforany errorsoromissionsthatmayhavebeenmade.Thepublisherremainsneutralwithregardtojurisdictional claimsinpublishedmapsandinstitutionalaffiliations. ThisSpringerimprintispublishedbytheregisteredcompanySpringerNatureB.V. Theregisteredcompanyaddressis:VanGodewijckstraat30,3311GXDordrecht,TheNetherlands Preface The expression of opinion is an exceedingly common use of natural language, so it is not surprising that most languages have a number of different ways to explicitly signal when it occurs. This work will focus on one of these ways, correspondingtoaclassofverbsthatcanbeusedtodescribetheexternalexpression of a subject’s opinion toward a future possibility. These “future-directed opining” verbs, some examples of which are given in (1), have a number of interesting grammatical characteristics, which can be tied to the fact that they can be thought of as simultaneously internal and external—the eventuality described involves the internalpositionofthesubject,butalsoanexternalexpressionofthatposition. (1) (a)Quentinrecommendsthatyougohiking. (b)Tyronedemandsthatyouleaveimmediately. (c)Olgaofferedtolendyouhercar. (d)Javierpromisedtoshowyouaroundtomorrow. Working out a semantics for the verbs that can accurately capture this dual nature is the principal purpose of this investigation, but it will overlap with discussions of how the verbs bear on several well-known grammatical puzzles. For example, future-directedopiningenvironmentsplayhosttofreechoiceeffects—unexpected conjunctive-likeinferencesknowntobefoundindisjunctiveenvironmentswhena modalorotherquantifierispresent—aswellasunexpectedreadingswithnegation, often labeled as “Neg-raised” readings when present with a subset of the internal attitudes. Thereisalotinhere,evenapartfromthenewdataintroduced.Fromthecomplex semanticstructureassignedtotheverbs,tothediscussionsofdispositionsandtheir establishment,theevidenceforanaccountofimplicaturethatisbothgrammatically basedandsensitivetocontextualrelevance,andthedrivetoprovideaunified,prin- cipled,andeconomicalapproachtothederivationofnegativeinterpretations,there arecertainlyargumentstobemadeforbreakingthisbookapartintomoredigestible chunks. However, because some of the arguments and decisions hinge on those made in other chapters, presenting the ensemble as a whole will hopefully paint amorecoherentandcompellingpictureofthenatureoftheverbs.Additionally,this v vi Preface willallowforasustainedattempttosituatethefuture-directedopiningverbswithin thebroaderclassofopinionverbscontributingtoamultidimensionalsketchofthe domain of verbal opinion, something that can hopefully act as a starting point for futureinvestigations. Toronto,ON,Canada MelanieBervoets Contents 1 Introduction .................................................................. 1 References..................................................................... 11 2 EventsandDispositions ..................................................... 13 2.1 AktionsartandClassesofVerbalPredicates........................... 13 2.2 Subjects,Objects,andSubmission..................................... 19 2.2.1 SentientSubjects................................................ 19 2.2.2 SubjectiveandObjectiveObjects.............................. 22 2.3 Attestation............................................................... 24 2.4 AccomplishmentsorAttitudes?........................................ 27 2.4.1 Strategyα:AccomplishmentsandDispositional Operators........................................................ 27 2.4.2 Strategyβ:AttitudesandEpisodicOperators................. 30 References..................................................................... 38 3 DistributionEffects.......................................................... 41 3.1 PatternsofFreeChoiceDisjunction ................................... 42 3.1.1 DistributionEffectswithModalsandQuantifiers............. 42 3.1.2 FreeChoicewithVerbs......................................... 45 3.2 Accounting for Free Choice: Implicature, Alternatives, andExhaustification .................................................... 59 3.2.1 AGrammaticalApproachtoFreeChoice..................... 66 3.2.2 OpiningVerbsandExhaustification ........................... 73 References..................................................................... 87 4 DeconstructingTheOpiningVerbs........................................ 89 4.1 ASemanticsforFuture-DirectedOpiningVerbs...................... 90 4.2 HABandDispositionalOpiningPredicates ........................... 99 4.2.1 HabitFormationandVerbs..................................... 103 4.3 αandβ,Again.......................................................... 109 References..................................................................... 113 vii viii Contents 5 Future-DirectedOpiningVerbsandNegation............................ 115 5.1 StrictNPILicensingMeetstheFuture-DirectedOpiningVerbs...... 116 5.2 NegativeReadingsandtheFuture-DirectedOpiningVerbs .......... 120 5.2.1 NegativeReadingswithαandβ............................... 124 5.3 NPILicensingandNegativeReadings................................. 127 5.4 UnexpectedReadingswithNegation:IntroducingNeg+.............. 129 5.4.1 CharacterizingNeg+:Readings,StrictNPIs,Stativity, WideScopeExistentialReadings,andCyclicity.............. 131 5.5 PotentialSourcesforNeg+ Inferences................................. 137 5.5.1 TheEMIandNeg+ ............................................. 139 5.6 EMI/EMI’:PresuppositionorImplicature............................. 148 5.6.1 PresuppositionalEMI/EMI’.................................... 148 5.6.2 Presuppositional EMI/EMI’ and Projection withNegativeQuantifiers ...................................... 150 5.6.3 PresuppositionalEMI/EMI’andPartialCyclicity ............ 152 5.6.4 Presuppositional EMI/EMI’ and Future-Directed OpiningVerbs................................................... 156 5.6.5 PragmaticEMI/EMI’........................................... 157 5.6.6 PragmaticEMI/EMI’andProjectionwithNegative Quantifiers....................................................... 167 5.6.7 PragmaticEMI/EMI’andPartialCyclicity.................... 169 5.6.8 PragmaticEMI/EMI’andFuture-DirectedOpiningVerbs ... 177 References..................................................................... 180 6 InConclusion:Opinions,Expression,andtheFuture................... 183 References..................................................................... 190 Index............................................................................... 191 Chapter 1 Introduction opine:holdandstateasone’sopinion NewOxfordAmericanDictionary Rememberthatallisanopinion. MarcusAurelius Abstract Theempiricaldomainintroducedhereisaclassofverbswhosemembers can be used to describe reports of opinion regarding future possibilities. Inves- tigating the semantic nature of these “future-directed opining verbs”—including recommend,offer,andpromise—involvesanexaminationofseveralkeyproperties, which also throws into relief what the verbs have in common with both the propositional attitudes and the speech reporting verbs, and where these groups diverge.Amongthebasicdimensionsatplayarecompatibilitywithdifferentkinds of subjects and objects, the types of events the verbs can describe, the presence or absence of a requirement for external attestation, and how the verbs combine with a dispositional operator. The future-directed opining verbs also interact with two important phenomena most commonly associated with modal quantifiers and attitudes, respectively, namely free choice disjunction and Neg-raising. Resulting expansionstothesetofcontextswhereeachappliessetupcriticalexaminationsof existingtheories,formingthesecondarysubjectmatterofthiswork. Opinionsandattitudesareubiquitousineverydayuseofnaturallanguage,andnot just with statements prefaced by phrases like in my view, according to his sister’s friend’s aunt, or the IMHO of the digital world. Languages have conventionalized ways to encode subjective relationships to entities, situations, and possibilities— including but not limited to intonation, modal quantifiers, evidential markings, pragmatic inferences, and expressive terms. This project zeroes in on one of the more direct and best studied areas of linguistically-encoded subjective position: the verbal domain. Chief among the relevant verbs have been those in the class containing believe, want, and wish, among others, verbs known as “propositional attitudes”, following Russell (1919), because they relate a subject to a proposition byidentifyingthesubject’sattitudetowardtheproposition.Cousinstotheseverbs arethosethatrelateasubjecttoanon-propositionalobjectinasimilarway.These verbs,likedesireandfavor,areamongtheso-called“intensionaltransitives”. Inthefollowingpages,Iwillfocusonverbsthatcantakeclausalorpropositional objects, and delineate a new class of intensional opinion verb, a class whose ©SpringerNatureB.V.2020 1 M.Bervoets,TheSemanticsofOpinion,StudiesinLinguisticsandPhilosophy102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1747-0_1
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