Linguistics doctoral student Bruce Oliver will give an in-person Linguistics Outside the Classroom colloquium.
Tsut: ‘think’, ‘want’, or both? Analyzing an underspecified attitude predicate in Secwepemctsín
Propositional attitude (PA) predicates are a class of predicates which report someone’s mental attitude towards a proposition: examples from English include think, believe, want, consider, and intend. In this talk, I present my analysis of the Secwepemctsín PA predicate tsut, which means ‘say’, ‘think’, ‘want’, or ‘intend’. How do all these different meanings come about? I analyze tsut as an underspecified PA predicate, which is to say that tsut by itself does not denote any specific propositional attitude. I argue that the different meanings of tsut are determined by the type of complement clause that tsut composes with: a tek-complement clause yields ‘say’ or ‘think’ meanings, while an e-complement clause yields ‘want’ or ‘intend’ meanings. My analysis is based on work by Kratzer (2006, 2013), Moulton (2009, 2015) and Grano (2015), who analyzed English PA predicates in a similar manner: my findings in Secwepemctsín lend cross-linguistic support to a decompositional analysis for PA predicates.
