On believing and hoping whether
Aaron Steven White
January 2021 

Theories of clause selection that aim to explain the distribution of interrogative and declarative complement clauses often take as a starting point that predicates like "think", "believe", "hope", and "fear" are incompatible with interrogative complements. After discussing experimental evidence against the generalizations on which these theories rest, I give corpus evidence that even the core data are faulty: "think", "believe", "hope", and "fear" are in fact compatible with interrogative complements, suggesting that any theory predicting that they should not be must be jettisoned.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005665 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	clause embedding, selection, interrogative, veridical, neg-raising, preferential, semantics
previous versions:	v4 [January 2021] v3 [January 2021] v2 [January 2021] v1 [January 2021]
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