Abstract
Proposition-denoting expressions tend to be expressed with ‘larger’ syntactic constituents, housing more functional structure, while expressions that denote events are typically ‘smaller’, often tenseless, phrases. This syntax-semantics mapping is best revealed under perception verbs. Epistemically positive perception reports (Barwise 1981)—so-called indirect perception reports—are expressed by finite CPs (as in the Italian example in (Gianni saw from the tears that Maria was crying, #but thought she was laughing), whereas epistemically neutral perception reports are expressed with infinitives (Gianni saw Maria crying but thought she was laughing). In this short report, we show that Pseudo-Relatives — while finite — give rise to direct perception like infinitives. We provide novel evidence, however, that PRs differ from infinitives in being referential descriptions of situations rather than being existentially quantified (Higginbotham 1983). We then propose, based on independent syntactic evidence, that PRs are headed by a determiner that is responsible for the low type of PRs compared to ‘normal’ finite clauses.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | NELS 45 |
| Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the Forty-fifth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society |
| Editors | Thuy Bui, Deniz Özyıldız |
| Place of Publication | Amherst, MA |
| Publisher | GLSA (Graduate Linguistics Student Association) |
| Pages | 193–202 |
| Volume | 2 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781517317737 |
| ISBN (Print) | 1517317738 |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Keywords
- perceptual reports
- pseudo relatives
- infinitives
- semantics
- syntax