Picky predicates: why believe doesn’t like interrogative complements, and other puzzles

Abstract

It is a long-standing puzzle why predicates like believe embed declarative but not interrogative complements (e.g., Bill believes that/*whether Mary left) and why predicates like wonder embed interrogative but not declarative complements (e.g., Bill wonders whether/*that Mary left). This paper shows how the selectional restrictions of a range of predicates (neg-raising predicates like believe, truth-evaluating predicates like be true, inquisitive predicates like wonder, and predicates of dependency like depend on) can be derived from semantic assumptions that can be independently motivated. Keywords Clause-embedding predicates • Selectional restrictions • Neg-raising 1 Introduction Certain clause-embedding predicates take both declarative and interrogative complements, as shown in (1) for know. Others take only declarative complements, as illustrated in (2) for believe, or only interrogative complements, as seen in (3) for wonder. (1) Bill knows that/whether/what Mary has eaten. (2) Bill believes that/*whether/*what Mary has eaten. (3) Bill wonders whether/what/*that Mary has eaten.

The *hope-wh puzzle

“…For instance, be certain and believe have very similar meanings, but why is it that the former is insensitive to inquisitiveness, while the latter is sensitive to it? Recently, Theiler et al (2019) and Mayr (2019) have proposed a partial answer to this question. As originally noticed by Zuber (1982), neg-raising predicates are generally anti-rogative (e.g.…”

“…believe, think, expect, assume, presume, reckon, advisable, desirable, likely). To explain this generalization, Theiler et al (2019) and Mayr (2019) put forward semantic accounts according to which such predicates give rise to logically trivial interpretations with interrogative complements, due to their negraising property. We do not go into the details of these accounts here, but we think such semantic explanations are conceptually attractive, as they reduce the selectional properties of these predicates to an independently observed semantic property.…”

“…The anti-rogativity of believe, therefore, needs to be explained by other means than type incompatibility. As mentioned before, see Theiler et al (2019) and Mayr (2019) for proposals to reduce it to its neg-raising property.…”

“…Clause-embedding predicates can be classified into three types (Grimshaw 1979;Lahiri 2002;Theiler et al 2019…”

Embedded Rising Declaratives and Embedded Quotation

“…To the extent that (anti)rogativity is due to restrictions that clause-embedding verbs place on the semantic type of their complements (for recent approaches, see Uegaki 2015;Theiler, Roelofsen & Aloni 2019), the parallel distribution of interrogatives and RDs under clause-embedding verbs might suggest that they share a semantic type, to the exclusion of (falling) declaratives. In this section, I argue that this conclusion is too hasty.…”