This thesis is an investigation of the structural and formal semantic properties of
copy raising constructions in English, as well as their expletive counterparts. The
first main claim is that contrary to what has been previously assumed, the perceiver
of the event (i.e. the Pgoal in Asudeh & Toivonen's 2012 terms) is an obligatory
syntactic and semantic argument of the matrix verb. I argue that the identification
of the Pgoal is not left to pragmatics, but rather that is represented as a silent
pronoun in the structure: one that picks up a logophoric antecedent. The result
of this is that the material in the embedded clause is semantically interpreted with
respect to the Pgoal's perspective. The second major claim of the thesis is that
this perspective-sensitivity is most appropriately captured using a modal semantic
framework (Kratzer, 1977, 1981 von Fintel & Heim, 2002). Specifically, I argue
that each of the different copy raising verbs encodes a different accessibility relation
between possible worlds or situations, while the Pgoal's information state provides
the relevant domain of worlds. Using these insights, I propose truth conditions for
these constructions, which ultimately are sensitive to a kind of stereotypical ordering,
and account for inter-speaker variability. Finally, I discuss the anomalous class of
copy raising constructions with non-thematic subjects, and argue that overlapping
discourse functions may have resulted in a shift away from modal semantics in these
cases. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / This thesis investigates the linguistic meaning associated with the "copy raising" sentence construction, e.g. "Your cat looks like she wants to go outside." I argue that the interpretation of these sentences is dependent on establishing the individual whose perspective is conveyed in the sentence, which does not need to be the speaker. After examining the range of contexts in which various different copy raising constructions can be used, I propose an analysis of their core meaning that draws on the philosophical idea of possible worlds, and the psychological notion of stereotypicality. I also address the question of whether these constructions are related to the phenomenon of evidentiality, a property of certain languages which allows the speaker to linguistically mark the source of evidence for their claim.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/18061 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Doran, Diane |
| Contributors | Kučerová, Ivona, Cognitive Science of Language |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
Page generated in 0.0026 seconds