Attitude ascriptions and speech reports
 

Angelika Kratzer
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Description
Attitude ascriptions and speech reports have a special place in Cognitive Science.
‘Recursion hunters’ (The New York Times, March 21, 2012) try to track them down
in every human language, looking for evidence for complex syntax. Developmental
psychologists consider them milestones in the cognitive development of children.
Philosophers have linked them to ambiguities that don’t seem to exist anywhere
else. What is it that makes attitude ascriptions and speech reports stand out? Why
are they so hard to acquire? And where do those curious ambiguities come from?
If there is anything that makes sentences like (1) or (2) special, it’s probably not the
matrix verbs or the embedded clauses all by themselves.

(1) Mo thinks these are turnips.
(2) But Bo says they are parsnips.

A better bet is that what’s special about (1) or (2) is the way matrix verbs and
embedded clauses connect up with each other. Current linguistic theory has
trivialized this connection: embedded clauses like those in (1) and (2) are
commonly taken to be arguments of the matrix verb. They are said to literally be
their direct objects. Questioning and moving away from this assumption will pave
the way towards explaining some puzzling facts about apparent embedded
‘complements’ in natural languages. More importantly, this (at first glance radical)
step will uncover a surprisingly rich and varied toolkit of techniques that natural
languages use to build attitude ascriptions and speech reports.

Topics
Here is a list of topics that this course might address (not necessarily all of them):
 

• The textbook analysis of attitude ascriptions and speech reports
• Challenges to the textbook analysis
• Formal background: Situation semantics and the new theory of modality.
   Modal domain projection.
• Constructing attitude ascriptions and speech reports from scratch.
   Identifying and lining up the building blocks
• Predicting cross-linguistic variation
• Representing logophoric pronouns
• Proleptic arguments: upstairs or downstairs?
• Do complementizers have meanings?
• The syntax of context shifting
• Wobbly island constraints