The Syntax and Semantics of Light Attitudes

Abstract

This dissertation argues for the existence of functional attitude predicates, light attitudes, such as light say and light see. Two phenomena are identified as functional attitudes: evidentiality and logophoric say-complementizers. I propose that reportative evidential markers and logophoric licensing complementizers are cross-linguistic variations of overt morphosyntactic realizations of the same light attitude: a functionalized predicate say. The parallel between evidentiality and logophoricity drawn here highlights their properties that have not been discussed or formally accounted for until now, and explains why they are in a typological complementary distribution across the world's languages. At the same time, direct and reportative evidentials even within the same language exhibit a number of syntactic and semantic differences that have not been noticed in the literature before. I derive them from the analysis of reportative and direct evidentials as different kinds of functional predicates: say and perceive, respectively. After establishing the nature of evidentials, I develop their syntactic and semantic properties formally. I claim that light attitudes are hosted by a projection cP, which selects CP and has properties similar to that of the light verb projection vP, such as argument structure, thematic roles, and `flavors'. The semantic composition of light attitudes is based on that of lexical attitudes, for which I am following and expanding ideas from de-compositional semantics. This allows for a simple and conceptually motivated analysis that does not need any additional theoretical primitives. I develop novel methodology to test for evidential challengeability and newness of evidentials that take the between-evidential differences into account. The results support the representation of the evidential contribution as a presupposition.