Meaning and grammar seminar

Speaker: Ciyang Qing (University of Edinburgh)

Title: The *hope-whether puzzle revisited

Abstract: Uegaki & Sudo (2019) observes that non-veridical preferential predicates such as hope are incompatible with interrogative complements, e.g., *Ben hopes {whether Mary/which students} will be invited to the party. Recently, White (2021) provides corpus examples challenging this generalization. In this talk, by examining White's (2021) counterexamples and further English as well as crosslinguistic data, I suggest that while Uegaki & Sudo's (2019) empirical generalization needs to be revised, their formal account provides a useful baseline to analyze the various types of counterexamples.