7 - Other Topics

Summary

Here we round up three topics not covered elsewhere in the book. The first is embedded tense, which gives rise to two main puzzles: sequence of tense (embedded past tense that seems not to be interpreted) and double access (embedded present tense that seems to be anchored both to the utterance time and to the matrix evaluation time). We discuss theories of tense in attitude reports that grapple with these puzzles. The second topic is Neg Raising: sometimes, a negated attitude report seems to be interpreted as though the negation were embedded in the complement clause (e.g., a salient reading of Beatrix doesn’t think it’s raining is Beatrix thinks that it’s not raining). We discuss syntactic solutions (negation is pronounced high but interpreted low) as well as semantic/pragmatic solutions (the unexpected interpretation is the result of a semantic or pragmatic inference). Finally, the third topic is intensional transitive verbs, which create attitude reports with ordinary direct objects rather than complement clauses (e.g., Beatrix wants a frisbee or Beatrix is looking for Polly). We discuss the implications of such sentences for the status of intensionality in grammar.