Experiments on the acceptability and possible readings of questions embedded under emotive-factives

Natural Language Semantics 25 (3):223-261 (2017)
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Abstract

Emotive-factive predicates, such as surprise or be happy, are a source of empirical and theoretical puzzles in the literature on embedded questions. Although they embed wh-questions, they seem not to embed whether-questions. They have complex interactions with negative polarity items such as any or even, and they have been argued to preferentially give rise to weakly exhaustive readings with embedded questions. We offer an empirical overview of the situation in three experiments collecting acceptability judgments, monotonicity judgments, and truth-value judgments. The results straightforwardly confirm the special selectional properties of emotive-factive predicates. More interestingly, they reveal the existence of strongly exhaustive readings for surprise. The results also suggest that the special properties of emotive-factives cannot be solely explained by their monotonicity profiles, because they were not found to differ from the profiles of other responsive predicates.

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Citations of this work

Attitude verbs’ local context.Kyle Blumberg & Simon Goldstein - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 46 (3):483-507.
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References found in this work

Syntax and semantics of questions.Lauri Karttunen - 1977 - Linguistics and Philosophy 1 (1):3--44.
Questions and Answers in Embedded Contexts.Utpal Lahiri - 2001 - Oxford University Press UK.
Question Embedding and the Semantics of Answers.Benjamin Ross George - 2011 - Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles
Semantic analysis of wh-complements.Jeroen Groenendijk & Martin Stokhof - 1982 - Linguistics and Philosophy 5 (2):175 - 233.

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