Lecture | Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
Size/flavor correlations in the grammar of attitudes and modals
- Date
- Thursday 5 December 2024
- Time
- Series
- Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.01
Abstract
Cross-linguistically, complements to ‘think’/‘believe’ verbs tend to resemble declarative main clauses whereas complements to ‘want’ tend to be structurally smaller. Mandarin Chinese illustrates this trend in a particularly striking way because it has a mental attitude verb 想 xiǎng that can be used to report both beliefs and desires, with a syntactic restriction: when the verb combines with a full CP, it reports a belief, whereas when it combines with a vP, it reports a desire. In this talk, I propose to relate this phenomenon to an independent but similar cross-linguistic fact about modality: namely, epistemic modals combine with tensed complements whereas root modals combine with structurally smaller complements that do not include tense. Toward a unified account of the attitude facts and the modality facts, I propose that epistemic modals and belief predicates operate on world descriptions (i.e., propositions), which are encoded by full CPs, whereas root modals and desire predicates operate on temporally truncated, future-oriented situation descriptions, encoded by smaller pieces of structure. The upshot is that at least some of the grammar of attitude reports falls out from a more general grammar of modality, broadly construed.