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Triviality and interrogative embedding: context sensitivity, factivity, and neg-raising

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Abstract

Why do predicates like know embed both declarative and interrogative clauses, whereas closely related ones like believe only embed the former? The standard approach following Grimshaw (Linguist Inq 10:279–326, 1979) to this issue has been to specify lexically for each predicate which type of complement clause it can combine with. This view is challenged by predicates such as be certain, which embed interrogative clauses only in certain contexts. To deal with this issue, this paper proposes (i) a novel, unified semantics for declarative and interrogative embedding and (ii) a theory where embedding is constrained by semantic considerations. The reason for the apparent unembeddability of an interrogative clause under a given predicate is the resulting trivial meaning of the sentence. Such triviality manifests itself in unacceptability. Crucially, it is affected by both the lexical meaning of the predicate and the polarity of the sentence as a whole.

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Acknowledgements

Many people contributed to this paper by providing comments, criticism, and encouragement and thereby improved it considerably. In particular, I thank Gennaro Chierchia, Franzi Conradts, Andreas Haida, Irene Heim, Kyle Johnson, Hazel Pearson, Nadirah Porter-Kasbati, Uli Sauerland, Philippe Schlenker, Viola Schmitt, Kerstin Schwabe, Benjamin Spector, and Hubert Truckenbrodt. Different versions of the paper have been presented at ZAS, at the universities of Belfast, Göttingen, Siena, Tübingen, and Vienna, and at Sinn und Bedeutung 21. I thank the audiences for their patience and their comments. I am also indebted to two anonymous reviewers for NALS for some great suggestions and questions of the highest quality. Finally, I thank the editors of NALS for help with the final version of the manuscript and Christine Bartels for her copy editing work. The work reported here has been supported by DFG Grant STE2555/2-1.

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    Clemens Mayr

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Mayr, C. Triviality and interrogative embedding: context sensitivity, factivity, and neg-raising. Nat Lang Semantics 27, 227–278 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-019-09153-8

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