Semantics etc.

Mandy Simons has a number of updates on her website. One paper I highly recommend is this:

“Observations on embedding verbs, evidentiality, and presupposition”. (Under review.)

This paper discusses the semantically parenthetical use of clause-embedding verbs such as see, hear, think, believe, discover and know. When embedding verbs are used in this way, the embedded clause carries the main point of the utterance, while the main clause serves some discourse function. Frequently, this function is evidential, with the parenthetical verb carrying information about the source and reliability of the embedded claim, or about the speaker’s emotional orientation to it. Other functions of parenthetical uses of verbs are discussed.Particular attention is paid to the parenthetical uses of semi-factive and factive verbs. It is demonstrated that when so used, these verbs are in no way presuppositional; that is, there is no presumption, or even pretense, that their complements have common ground status. It is further demonstrated that the loss of presuppositionality is not accompanied by a loss of factivity: in their parenthetical use, these verbs are non-presuppositional, but still factive. It is argued that this non-presuppositional use of factive verbs provides support for the (minority) view that presupposition is not a conventional property of lexical items.

Mandy’s paper connects to two concerns of mine: the idea that many people have that epistemic modals do not contribute to truth-conditions but are evidential markers of sorts, and the question of whether conventional/semantic presuppositions are always pragmatic presuppositions (and the other way round). I bet that I will have occasion to cite and comment on her paper very soon in my own work.

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