We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode (GU) at the Semantics Colloquium.
Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday at 4 pm.
Title: A Unified Semantics for Hidden and Complement Fulfilling Conditionals in Desire reports
Date: November 19
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm
Abstract:
The topic of this talk is the semantics of desire reports, as illustrated by the examples in (1).
(1) a. I want you to be here.
b. I wish you were here.
c. I would be glad if you were here.
d. I’m glad that you are here.
The focus will be on the interpretation of the sentences in (1) at the syntax-semantics interface. Heim (1992) argues that sentences like (1-a) and (1-b) hide a conditional on some level of semantic interpretation. Williams (1974) has argued that the “if”-clauses in examples like (1-c) is “complement fulfilling”. Typically, predicates that license complement fulfilling conditionals are classified as factive when they combine with a “that”-clause, as in (1-d). I will argue that all the sentences in (1) share a common semantics that centers around the notion of modal evaluatives that take conditional clauses as their semantic arguments.