Abstract
To account for the characteristics of future-directed opining verbs observed in Chap. 2—including the kinds of eventualities the verbs can be used to describe, and the types of subjects and objects they can combine with—the most promising semantic analysis attributes to each verb both an episodic attestation element and a modal opinion term. Combining this with the desideratum from Chap. 3 for EXH to be able to combine directly with the modal, as well as independent evidence from the potential attachment sites of adverbials like again, entries inspired by Kratzer (Decomposing attitude verbs. In: Talk in honor of A. Mittwoch. The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 2006) and Hacquard (Nat Lang Semant 18:79–114, 2010) can be fleshed out in such a way that each of the two elements is exposed within the semantic structure. The modal details will vary from verb to verb, both in terms of force and modal background. The attestation element will make the verbs episodic, and so combination with a dispositional operator, HAB, is required to get the attitude-like manifestations of the verbs. The establishment of such dispositional opinions will align the future-directed opining verbs with other opining verbs, but contrast them with other submission verbs, a situation that can be tied to the presence of lexically encoded opinion. Finally, clearly laying out the semantic details attributed to the verbs highlights an additional advantages of adopting the analysis outlined in Chap. 2, one that stems from the verbs’ modality.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“Eventive” is meant as a cover term for all the non-stative categories of predicates; on Vendler (1957)’s account, this means all of the activities, accomplishments, and achievements are eventive. “Eventuality” is intended to describe both states and non-stative events.
- 2.
As mentioned in a footnote in Chap. 2, we do sometimes find atypical sources with some of the verbs, as in the apartment’s south-facing windows promised to provide lots of natural light, or the south-facing garden permits us to sit outside into the fall. It’s not obvious that we should find such cases—while inert contentless objects acting as sources of information or ideas is not unheard of (as in (1) to (3) below), they are not usually able to act as sources when opinions on future possibilities are involved (as in (4) to (6) below).
-
(1)
The trail brings to mind the time we hiked the provincial park in the rain.
-
(2)
The footprints brought to light the fact that the homeowner might not be alone.
-
(3)
The refrigerator contents told him what he needed to know.
-
(4)
# The refrigerator contents told him to buy more vegetables.
-
(5)
# The warm temperature recommends that we go for a swim.
-
(6)
# The footprints insist that we consider who might be in the house with the owner.
There seems to be something special about the particular opinion verbs that allow for combination with these inert contentless subjects. I won’t explore this here, but note that one possible avenue of explanation could be the different modal details of each future-directed opining verb, as discussed below.
-
(1)
- 3.
There is something interesting going on with the (b) cases: the modal statement that “again” holds true actually has a new ordering source—the new king’s edicts, as compared to, probably, the last regent’s. We see this also with non-opining verbs, as in the new king needs the nomads to marry again, where the necessity that “again” holds involves an ordering source tied to the new king, not the old regent. I’ll leave this as a puzzle for the future.
- 4.
Note that this is not an argument against β, as that strategy would also attribute both a modal attitude element and some kind of attestation morpheme to the accomplishment cases.
- 5.
Note that at first glance, it appears that neither opining verbs nor speech reporters are available in what we take to be their basic non-habitual accomplishment forms with inanimate subjects:
-
(1)
(a) # The pamphlet was promising at that moment that you will make your money back with a year.
(b) # The article was remarking that the scam was particularly successful in the outskirts of the city.
So not only are promising or remarking events not necessary to initiate dispositions, they appear to not even be possible as events. However, if we can attribute something like animacy (or better yet, variability over time) to these traditionally inanimate objects, these events become possible:
-
(2)
At that moment, the electronic billboard was promising that the lawyer will win your case, or his services will be free of charge.
As of the early twenty-first century, we don’t have versions of pamphlets and articles that vary over time in this way, but when we do (or when we imagine we are living in the kind of world Disney promises children, in which any object can be animate), we will have no problem accepting these descriptions of events.
Note that when inanimate things become variable over time, we find the same contrast between opining verbs and speech reporters illustrated in (311) and (312) for animate subjects:
-
(3)
(a) After the electronic billboard has once displayed a promise that the lawyer will win your case:
The electronic billboard promises that the lawyer will win your case.
(b) After the electronic billboard has remarked once that the lawyer will win your case:
# The electronic billboard remarks that the lawyer will win your case.
-
(1)
- 6.
Of course, a remark may describe a modal opinion in its object, as in Kendrick remarked that Jay allows his daughter to play in Prospect Park. Critically though, such an opinion need not belong to the source of the remark, and there is no necessary connection between the matrix subject and the view. And while a remark (or observation, etc.) may lead to inferences about its source’s opinions through other means, e.g. through pragmatic reasoning about the utterance, this doesn’t follow from the semantics of the verb alone.
- 7.
The say-as-a-comment part of this entry is lifted from the Oxford American Dictionary definition of remark.
- 8.
Here I diverge from the semantics Anand and Hacquard (2008) give for the proffering verbs. As these verbs of acceptance are not the focus of this work, the entry given in (320) is very much a first pass, and may need to be modified, particularly in ways that make it look more like profferings of Anand and Hacquard. Nonetheless, however the semantics for these verbs come out, they should reflect the difference between the opinion-based acceptance verbs and the non-opining speech reporters.
- 9.
Finding contexts parallel to (326) and (327) for permit is very difficult, and it seems like the disjunctive entailment yielded by β is always available for this verb. At first brush, this might suggest that we pursue one strategy for verbs like offer and promise, and another for permit, but this appears to be somewhat rash when we consider (1) below.
-
(1)
(a) Ralph permits you to have coffee or tea.
(b) You can have coffee or tea, according to Ralph.
(c) Ralph is disposed to say you may have coffee or tea.
Ifpermit is a β type verb, (1a) should behave similarly to (1b), and indeed, for both we find that an utterance of the sentence would not be licensed if neither disjunct holds. The thing is, (1c), which is similar to an explicit rendering of an α version of permit, is also extremely odd in contexts where Ralph is not disposed to say you may have coffee and Ralph is not disposed to say you may have tea. This is not a knockdown argument, but it does seem that there is something specific to the granting of permission that makes anything other than a free choice reading odd.
-
(1)
References
Anand, Pranav, and Valentine Hacquard. 2008. Epistemics with attitude. In SALT XVIII, ed. T. Friedman and S. Ito. Ithaca: Cornell University.
Beck, S., and K. Johnson. 2004. Double objects again. Linguistic Inquiry 35(1): 97–123.
Boneh, Nora, and Edit Doron. 2013. Hab and Gen in the expression of habituality. Genericity 43: 176–191.
Boyd, Julian, and J.P. Thorne. 1969. The semantics of modal verbs. Journal of Linguistics 5(1): 57–74.
Dahl, Östen. 1975. On generics. In Formal semantics of natural language, ed. Ed Keenan, 99–112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fodor, J., and E. Lepore. 2001. Morphemes matter: The continuing case against lexical decomposition. Manuscript, Rutgers University.
Hacquard, Valentine. 2010. On the event relativity of modal auxiliaries. Natural Language Semantics 18: 79–114.
Kratzer, Angelika. 2006. Decomposing attitude verbs. In Talk in honor of A. Mittwoch. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University.
Lawler, John M. 1973. Studies in English generics: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor dissertation.
Link, Godehard. 1983. The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms: A lattice theoretical approach. In Meaning, use and interpretation of language, ed. Rayner Bauerle, Christoph Schwarze, and Arnim von Stechow, 209–250. Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.
Menendez-Benito, Paula. 2012. On dispositional sentences. Genericity 43: 276.
von Stechow, A. 1995. Lexical decomposition in syntax. In The lexicon in the organization of language, ed. Egli et al. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Vendler, Zeno. 1957. Verbs and times. Philosophical Review LXVI: 143–160.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bervoets, M. (2020). Deconstructing The Opining Verbs. In: The Semantics of Opinion. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 102. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1747-0_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1747-0_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-024-1746-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-024-1747-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)