6 - Desire Reports and Beyond

Summary

In this chapter, we move beyond belief reports to consider the semantics of desire reports (like Beatrix wants it to rain), which bring forth new puzzles that have inspired a literature of their own, and that implicate attitude reports in a wide variety of semantically relevant grammatical phenomena such as mood, modality, gradability, focus, and presupposition projection. We give central attention to the competing approaches to desire reports set forth in influential work by Irene Heim and by Kai von Fintel, and we discuss the various issues with these approaches that have inspired refinements and alternatives. We close by scaling out even further to consider broad points of similarity and divergence among different kinds of attitude reports, beyond belief and desire.