Desire, belief, and semantic composition: variation in mood selection with desire predicates
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Desire, belief, and semantic composition: variation in mood selection with desire predicates Paul Portner1 · Aynat Rubinstein2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Mood selection properties of desire verbs provide a rich source of evidence regarding the semantics of propositional attitudes. This paper approaches the topic by providing an analysis of crosslinguistic variation in the selection patterns of the desire verbs ‘want’ and ‘hope’, focusing on Spanish and French. There is no evidence that the meanings of ‘hope’ and ‘want’ differ between these languages, and yet in Spanish esperar ‘hope’ and querer ‘want’ both take subjunctive, while in French only vouloir ‘want’ selects subjunctive and espérer ‘hope’ strongly prefers the indicative. The inclination of ‘hope’ toward the indicative is manifest also in other Romance languages. Previous theories tie mood selection tightly to the verb’s modal backgrounds and do not anticipate such variation. We explain the consistency in mood selection with ‘want’ versus the variation with ‘hope’ in terms of two key ideas: (i) moods are modal operators that encode different degrees of modal necessity, and (ii) modal backgrounds can be manipulated by the grammar. In terms of (i), we argue, building on the comparison-based theory of mood, that the indicative is a strong necessity operator, while the subjunctive encodes a weaker necessity. Regarding (ii), we propose that two backgrounds may function as one under certain well-defined circumstances.
We would like to thank our consultants: Delphine Kanyandekwe, Pascal Moyal, Valentine Hacquard, Chloé Tahar, Isabelle Charnavel, Héctor Campos, Paula Menéndez-Benito, Elena Herburger, Alda Mari, Raffaella Zanuttini, Andrea Beltrama, Michael Ferrara, Marco Alves, Ricardo Cyncynates, Armanda Ulldemolins Subirats, David Ginebra, Mihaela Baicoianu, Donka Farkas, and Carla Baricz. We received extremely helpful feedback from many colleagues, in particular Alda Mari, Elena Herburger, Philippe Schlenker, Paula Menéndez-Benito, Kai von Fintel, and Luka Crniˇc, as well audiences at Bar-Ilan University, the École normale supérieure, and Georgetown University. This research was supported by a Senior Faculty Research Fellowship from Georgetown University and a visiting professorship from the Institut Jean Nicod, ENS, to Paul Portner and a research grant from the Mandel Scholion Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to Aynat Rubinstein. We also thank our reviewers and the editors at Natural Language Semantics for helping us to focus the argument and polish its final presentation.
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Aynat Rubinstein [email protected]
1
Georgetown University, Department of Linguistics, Washington, DC 20057, USA
2
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
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P. Portner, A. Rubinstein
Our proposal supports the decompositional approach to attitude verbs, where mood is responsible for the quantificational force traditionally attributed to the verb.
1 Introduction: crosslinguistic variation in mood choice Many languages sho
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