What embedded sentences do
Instructor:Tom Robertst.d.h.roberts@uu.nl
Here you will find all course notes, slides, problems, and a small boatload of optional readings if you are curious to learn more. If there are any errors that need to be corrected I will make a note of that here too.
If you were not in the Week 1 course on sentence types, taking a gander at that page might provide come useful context. However, it possible to understand each course in isolation.
Day 1: Intro to clausal embedding [slides]
Errata: Some errors involving the entailments of factive and neg-raising predicates were fixed.Readings:
- Grimshaw, Jane. (1979). Complement selection and the lexicon. Linguistic Inquiry 10(2): 279-326. [link]
Day 2: The responsive predicate puzzle [slides]
Readings:- Spector, Benjamin & Paul Egre. (2015). A uniform semantics for embedded interrogatives: an answer, not necessarily the answer. Synthese 192(6): 1729-1784.[link]
- Uegaki, Wataru. (2016). Content nouns and the semantics of question-embedding. Journal of Semantics 33(4): 623-660. [link]
Day 3: Factivity, neg-raising, and "lexical" inferences [slides]
Errata: The example with presupposition projection and several typos were fixed.Readings:
- Kiparsky, Paul & Carol Kiparsky. (1970). Fact. In M. Bierwisch & K.E. Heidolph (eds.), Progress in linguistics: A collection of papers, 143–173.[link]
- Roberts, Tom. (2019). I can't believe it's not lexical: Deriving distributed veridicality. In Proceedings of SALT 29: 665–685. [link]
- Theiler, Nadine, Floris Roelofsen, & Maria Aloni. (2019). Picky predicates: why believe doesn’t like interrogative complements, and other puzzles. Natural Language Semantics 27: 95-134. [link]
Day 4: Embedded clauses as modifiers [slides]
Readings:- Djärv, Kajsa. (2023). Knowing and believing things: What DP-complementation can tell us about the meaning and composition of (factive) attitudes. Journal of Semantics 40: 179-233. [link]
- Elliott, Patrick. (2017). Elements of Clausal Embedding, UCL dissertation.[link]