When can non-veridical preferential attitude predicates take questions?
Ciyang Qing, Deniz Özyıldız, Floris Roelofsen, Maribel Romero, Wataru Uegaki
March 2024 

A growing body of evidence suggests that whether or not attitude predicates may combine with question complements is determined at least in part by some of their semantic properties. Zooming in, non-veridical preferential predicates (NVPs) such as hope and fear have been claimed not to combine with questions but this empirical generalization as well as its proposed explanation have been challenged by a number of counterexamples, whose properties---beyond the fact that they feature embedded questions---remain ill understood. By taking a closer look at the combinatorial and semantic properties of different NVPs from English, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Turkish, this work narrows down the semantic properties of attitude predicates that determine their combinatorial properties in a cross-linguistically informed and predictive way. We identify a class of hope-like predicates that are restricted both in the kinds of question complements that they may combine with and in their interpretation with them. Roughly, hope whether p is sometimes attested, and always means hope that p. We also identify other classes of NVPs that are freer to combine with different kinds of questions and give rise to a wider range of interpretations.

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Reference:	lingbuzz/008113 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	clause embedding, attitude predicates, selectional restrictions, veridicality, preferentiality, clausal distributivity, semantics
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