This paper deals with ASL nouns and demonstrates (despite previous suggestions in the literature) that ASL belongs to Chierchia’s group (III), i.e. languages without overt number marking and a visible countability distinction. Although the countability distinction appears to be hidden at first glance, it can be flushed out. I account for the phenomenon in terms of properties of [n+__ ], showing that the countability distinction must be grammatical in ASL. This paper is thus a first step towards an examination of the count/mass distinction in ASL. We find that as predicted by the previous literature (Chierchia 2010, Deal 2017), the countability distinction in ASL, albeit not being immediately visible at all, is connected to number marking.

In this chapter, I discuss the main experimental issues bearing on thecomprehension of ISAs. A first question concerns differences in processingbetween direct and indirect SAs, and a second question relates to thedifferences between the indirect uses and the literal/direct uses of ISAconstructions. Another issue is whether the understanding of an utterance asan ISA necessarily implies the derivation of the direct meaning of theconstruction used, and what properties of the construction make such adirect meaning more or less likely to be inferred.

Thischapter defines the book’s object of study and explains its significance in linguistics and philosophy. It then discusses the book’s theoretical framework, its intended readership, and its topical emphasis, and it summarizes the book’s remaining chapters. In a nutshell, the book is about the semantics of propositional attitude reports: sentences centered around clause-embedding psychological verbs like Beatrix thinks it’s raining or Beatrix wants it to rain. Such sentences bear on foundational issues in the philosophy of language concerning the nature of sentence meaning and proper names. They also interact in intricate ways with many semantically relevant grammatical phenomena of interest to linguists specializing in semantics. This book surveys the key data, concepts, and theories concerning the compositional interpretation of attitude reports, assuming a model of grammar that includes a generative syntactic component that assembles structures and an interpretive semantic component that assigns truth conditions to those structures. The book is meant for students and researchers of linguistics who have had at least one or two graduate-level courses in formal semantics.

In this chapter, we move beyond belief reports to consider the semantics of desire reports (like Beatrix wants it to rain), which bring forth new puzzles that have inspired a literature of their own, and that implicate attitude reports in a wide variety of semantically relevant grammatical phenomena such as mood, modality, gradability, focus, and presupposition projection. We give central attention to the competing approaches to desire reports set forth in influential work by Irene Heim and by Kai von Fintel, and we discuss the various issues with these approaches that have inspired refinements and alternatives. We close by scaling out even further to consider broad points of similarity and divergence among different kinds of attitude reports, beyond belief and desire.

De se attitude reports are attitude reports that are, in some sense, first-personal from the attitude holder’s perspective. For example, the sentence Beatrix hopes to win reports a situation where Beatrix thinks: “I hope I win.” It would be false in a scenario where, for example, Beatrix, watching herself competing in a prerecorded televised event without recognizing that she is watching herself, thinks: “I hope she wins.” (Compare: Beatrix hopes that she will win, which is true in such a mistaken-identity scenario.) Considerations of this sort have inspired the view that at least some attitude reports involve quantification not over worlds simpliciter but instead over world-individual pairs (‘centered worlds’). We discuss a number of variants of and alternatives to this approach, the ultimate goal being to build a theory that can accurately predict where de se readings of attitude reports are obligatory and where they are merely possible. We also discuss the analytical connection between de se attitude reports and relevant cross-linguistic grammatical phenomena such as control, indexicality, logophoricity, and long-distance reflexives.

This chapter introducesattitude reports in possible worlds semantics, with attention to the motivation of such an approach and its main challenges, and the major revisions and alternatives that such challenges have prompted. We begin with a brief introduction to possible worlds semantics. We then sketch Jaakko Hintikka’s highly influential possible worlds-based approach to attitude reports and outline the key predictions that it makes. We discuss the problem of logical omniscience that Hintikka’s approach faces, and outline two competing approaches for solving it. We then turn to the more basic problem of logical equivalence that any approach to attitude reports in possible worlds semantics faces; we discuss several solution strategies thatgo under the name ‘hyperintensionality’ in that they proffer ways of modeling propositions that achieve a finer grain than do possible worlds. A recurring question in this discussion is: Which of our intuitions about inference patterns in attitude reports reflect semantic reasoning, and which reflect pragmatic or extra-linguistic reasoning? Finally, we explore two competing hypotheses regarding the compositional semantics of attitude reports.

Here we round up three topics not covered elsewhere in the book. The first is embedded tense, which gives rise to two main puzzles: sequence of tense (embedded past tense that seems not to be interpreted) and double access (embedded present tense that seems to be anchored both to the utterance time and to the matrix evaluation time). We discuss theories of tense in attitude reports that grapple with these puzzles. The second topic is Neg Raising: sometimes, a negated attitude report seems to be interpreted as though the negation were embedded in the complement clause (e.g., a salient reading of Beatrix doesn’t think it’s raining is Beatrix thinks that it’s not raining). We discuss syntactic solutions (negation is pronounced high but interpreted low) as well as semantic/pragmatic solutions (the unexpected interpretation is the result of a semantic or pragmatic inference). Finally, the third topic is intensional transitive verbs, which create attitude reports with ordinary direct objects rather than complement clauses (e.g., Beatrix wants a frisbee or Beatrix is looking for Polly). We discuss the implications of such sentences for the status of intensionality in grammar.

The de dicto/de re ambiguity concerns the multiplicity of readings that many attitude reports give rise to depending on whether an expression in the complement clause is interpreted as part of the content of the attitude (de dicto reading) or as an attitude-external means of referring to or quantifying over some aspect of the content of the attitude (de re). For example, Beatrix wants to marry a plumber can report either that Beatrix wants her eventual spouse to have a particular occupation (de dicto) or that there is a particular plumber that Beatrix wants to marry (de re). We discuss the classic scope solution to this ambiguity, as well as theproblems for that approach that have inspired adjustments (world pronouns, split intensionality). We outline the implications of these adjustments for the grammar of attitude reports and of intensionality more generally. We then discuss a more serious problem (“double vision”) first noticed by W. V .O. Quine that has inspired a very different approach to de re readings, involving concept generators. We close by stepping back and asking: Should one approach ultimately be subsumed under the other, or are both needed in a comprehensive theory?

A central theoretical tension for the semantics of proper names and attitude reports, known as Frege’s puzzle, goes as follows. On the one hand, a simple and attractive theory holds that the sole semantic function of a proper name is to contribute a referent, leading to the prediction that co-referential proper names like Superman and Clark Kent are semantically equivalent.On the other hand, intuition tells us that it could be true to say that Lois Lane believes that Superman is strong while at the same time seemingly false to say that Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is strong. We survey the three most popular approaches to reconciling this tension: complicating the semantics of proper names (non-rigid designation), complicating the semantics of attitude reports (hidden indexicals), and complicating the pragmatics of attitude reports. We also discuss the related issues of Kripke’s puzzle, as well as Saul’s puzzle concerning substitution of co-referential proper names in simple sentences.