Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Across languages, SUBJECTIVE ATTITUDE VERBS (SAVs), such as English find, differ from ordinary doxastic attitude verbs (such as English believe) in that they require their complement to be subjective in a particular way. The goal of this paper is to develop a semantics for SAVs that predicts this fact but also captures the finer-grained differences between find-type SAVs and consider-type SAVs that make the former more restrictive than the latter. We propose that in terms of their core, at issue content, SAVs are just like believe in expressing a doxastic attitude towards the prejacent. They differ in that they introduce a presupposition that their prejacent is contingent with respect to a distinct set of discourse alternatives that we label COUNTERSTANCES: alternative common grounds that differ only in decisions about how to resolve semantic underdetermination. The larger theoretical significance of our proposal is that it supports a characterization of 'subjective language' as an essentially pragmatic, context-sensitive phenomenon, which does not correlate with semantic type (pace Sæbø) but derives from speakers' recognition of the possibility of counterstance.
Authors: Christopher Kennedy, Malte Willer
Institution: University of Chicago
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2560072256