Amy Rose Deal (University of California, Berkeley) will present a virtual colloquium on November 3rd 3:30-5pm, 2023.
Title: Uncentered attitude reports
Abstract: One of the major discoveries in attitude semantics over the last thirty years has been the fact that certain types of attitude reports require interpretation de se. This finding has prompted a move among semanticists to treat attitude verbs as uniformly quantifying over centered worlds (typically modeled as triples of worlds, individuals, and times), rather than merely over possible worlds, and likewise a move to treat attitude complements as uniformly denoting sets of centered worlds, rather than mere sets of possible worlds. I call this view De Se Uniformity, and in this talk, I argue against it, drawing on my fieldwork on Nez Perce (Sahaptian). I show that dedicated de se devices (shifty 1st person indexicals, relative tenses) are possible in one type of attitude report in Nez Perce, but not in another type, and argue that the difference between the two types of attitude report crucially reflects the semantics of the attitude verb and its complement. I argue in particular that some attitude complements provide sets of centered tuples, whereas others provide merely sets of possible worlds. I then explore what this perspective might reveal about the semantics of attitude reports de re, in view of the common understanding of de re semantics as built on de se semantics (Kaplan-Lewis de re semantics).
Link to related paper draft: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ardeal/papers/Deal-uncentered-attitudes.pdf
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