Linguistics and English Language

Meaning and grammar seminar

Speaker: Kajsa Djärv (University of Konstanz)

Title: Knowledge and belief: What DP-complementation can tell us about the meaning and composition of (factive) attitudes

Abstract: In the Hintikkan tradition, attitude verbs are viewed as relations between individuals and propositions, with differences among verbs understood in terms of the type of accessibility relation. Previous work on know and believe with Content DPs (e.g. know/believe the rumour) have analysed know DP vs. know CP as polysemy. I show that polysemy runs into conceptual and empirical problems, and propose instead a new derivational approach to know-verbs, which avoids polysemy; linking both know DP and know DP to the same lexical root, which describes, broadly speaking, acquaintance. This analysis thus provides an explicit and compositional morpho-semantic link between know DP and know CP that accounts for the interpretation of DP-complements as objects of acquaintance, and further captures the idea (e.g. Kratzer 2002, a.o.) that knowledge, and factivity more broadly, is tied to acquaintance with a situation, the res. I further argue that whereas verbs like know combine with individuals as part of their argument structure, verbs like believe select for propositions, and therefore can only combine with DPs via type-shifting (as in Uegaki 2016) or via an external licensing head (proposed here); thus explaining Djärv’s (2019) observation that the interpretation of DP complements of verbs like believe varies depending on the type of individual, e.g. Mary believes the rumour that p vs. Mary believes her doctor that p. This is unlike know-verbs, where both Content DPs like the rumour and individuals like the doctor are interpreted as objects of acquaintance. At the core of this proposal is the claim that verbs like know and believe differ fundamentally at the level of argument structure and internal morpho-semantic composition, and thus combine with DPs via different routes; contrary to uniform approaches to know and believe. The current proposal builds on and adds to previous work about links between factivity/veridicality, DP-complementation, and question-embedding.

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Meaning and grammar research group

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May 11 2021 -

Meaning and grammar seminar

2021-05-11: Knowledge and belief: What DP-complementation can tell us about the meaning and composition of (factive) attitudes

Online via link invitation