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The Syntax and Semantics of Light Attitudes Vesela Tihomirova Simeonova Thesis submitted to the University of Ottawa in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctorate in Philosophy degree in Linguistics Department of Linguistics Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa c Vesela Tihomirova Simeonova, Ottawa, Canada, 2020 Title: The Syntax and Semantics of Light Attitudes Author: Vesela Tihomirova Simeonova 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 func- tional attitudes: evidentiality and logophoric say-complementizers. I propose that reportative evidential markers and logophoric licensing complemen- tizers 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 comple- mentary 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 evi- dentials 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. ii Acknowledgments When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail Maslow's law of the hammer I often come across cases of Maslow's hammer when I read on the history of science and also creativity in general. What tools one has at hand turns out to underlie and prime discovery in all areas of endeavour of the human spirit. On one hand, this is tragic: we want our science to be objective, and our creative works to be the product of our imagination, which is presumably unbound, while the tools we have are very limited. But in a wicked way being `constrained' channels and shapes our imagination, ideas, and creative thought. Similarly, this dissertation is the product of all the tools that I have been handed or stumbled upon throughout the years, and each of them has contributed to this work being what it is (the errors and omissions it inevitably contains remain of course mine). I am grateful for each piece of idea and person. If I had met different people along the way, this work would have been different. I would have been different. I thank my supervisors at the University of Ottawa, Ana Arregui and Marisa Rivero, for the high standards to which they held my work, and their guidance for many years, all the way back to my MA. Marisa introduced me to the topic of evidentiality, when my research project was initially on the syntax of factivity and non-factivity in embedded clauses. Ana (partially) converted me from syntax to semantics and pragmatics. During a period when I was stuck with my dissertation, Marisa informally suggested in an elevator that I do something with my ideas on factivity, and Ana mentioned Keir Moulton's dissertation as related. From that point on my academic life made a full circle, things clicked, and the product of these two lines of work coming together | the `nail' resulting from all the `hammers' I had | is this dissertation. If it wasn't for Keir's work, I would have never made the connection. It is a great honor that he is my external examiner. I am grateful to him also for leading me to my next research project with one of his comments. iii I thank my supervisor at the University of Calgary, Carlos de Cuba, who taught me syntax, scientific thinking, research, and writing. He also taught me a lot about teaching and entrusted me to be a teaching assistant for advanced syntax when I was still an undergrad student. He introduced me to the topic of complementizers and factivity in my second semester in Linguistics, and this has rippled for a decade and still interests me as much as it did then, if not more. I am grateful to everyone else I met at University of Calgary, especially Betsy Ritter, Amanda Pounder, Julie Sedivy, Robert Murray, Susanne Carroll, Joey Windsor, Darin Flynn, Stephen Win- ters. Conversations with each of them have led to quantum leaps in my education and thinking. I am especially grateful to Caleb Lee from the Philosophy department, who introduced me to the power of formal logic. One day Ana casually suggested I check out some philosophy classes in episte- mology or metaphysics. This innocent idea quickly blew out of proportion and had profound consequences in my life beyond anything she or I could have ever imagined. I became a clandestine regular (sorry Ana!) at the Philosophy department and phi- losophy became my therapy and my guiding line in dark moments of my life. Paul Rusnock, David Hyder, Paul Forster, Patrice Philie, and the students in their classes made me feel at home and took me seriously. David allowed me to take his graduate seminar on Wittgenstein for credit and later a second time | for fun (I would do a third round too!). It is a great honor that he was one of my internal examiners. In the Linguistics department, I am grateful to everyone. Eric Mathieu, Rob Truswell, Andres Salanova, and Dennis Ott kept my interest in syntax alive. I am also especially grateful to Andres for being my internal examiner and showing me a whole new way of being a scientist, as well as giving me a recipe for farinata that became a staple in my kitchen. I thank Eric for supporting me financially to go to ESSLI and teaching me in the Doctoral seminar. I still use daily the knowledge I learned there. Jamie White and Marc Brunelle helped me appreciate phonology. I thank Stephen Levey, Kevin McMullin, Shana Poplack, Ian Mackay for important conversations. I iv thank Laura Sabourin and Tania Zamuner for brushing up my knowledge of statistics and psycholinguistics. I thank Laura and Dennis for supervising my qualifying paper in experimental syntax. A chunk of my dissertation was born in that project. I thank Nikolay Slavkov for supervising me on a child language project and giving me the joy of talking in Bulgarian. It was also a joy to have him on my examiner committee. I am especially grateful to my department for the teaching opportunities I was given. Throughout my whole PhD I was a teaching assistant for the advanced courses in syntax and semantics where I was in my element, and I taught semantics as the primary instructor. Teaching was one of the most rewarding experiences of my pro- fessional life. I am grateful to my students for their trust, the funny drawings of cats, linguistics poems and songs, cartoons illustrating pragmatic principles, the feedback, cards, and notes of gratitude, and their ingenious solutions to problems that have no solutions, ideas for more problems to be solved, and ideas for connections between semantics and other fields of study. I learned so much from my students. One of my proudest moments was when a professor from another university overheard my students informally discussing a topic from class at a reception and thought they were graduate students department. Some of my students indeed became graduate students and some of them were even my officemates. I am especially grateful to the Teaching and Learning Support Service center where I completed my 3-year Certifi- cate in University Teaching for Professors. I applied in my classroom everything I learned from Jovan Groen, Melissa Brasgold, Jean-Pascal Beaudoin, Melanie Perras. I am also grateful to Ai Taniguchi, Yael Sharvit, and Paula Menedez-Benito for invit- ing me to teach a class at Carleton University, UCLA, and University of Tuebingen, respectively. My interactions with their students were enlightening. I am also grateful for the funding I have received: the Alberta provincial under- graduate scholarship, the University of Ottawa admission and excellence scholarships, multiple Ontario Graduate Scholarships, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council doctoral scholarship, a travel grant from the Slavic Linguistic Society, as well v as funding from professors' grants towards research and conference travel. I thank Barbara Vanderhyden for allowing me to take her class Community Outreach and Media Relations in the Sciences. I had to first convince her that linguistics is a science, which surprised her, but she was open and she let me in and I learned a lot from her and from my fellow students in the class. The admin and support staff I met at the University of Ottawa was outstanding. Suzanne Dalrymple, Roxanne Lacelle, Paul-Andre David, Nancy Chicoine, Donna Desbiens, Jeanne D'Arc Turpin, Monica Batallanos are the pillars that keep the show running. A special thanks to Moe Belanger for being so much more than an IT expert. I am grateful for having met all my fellow students. Special thanks to Jumanah Abusulaiman, Tharanga Weerasooriya, Matthew Hunt, and Ana Werkmann-Horvat, who made my journey into semantics much less lonely, to Gita Zareikar, Lyra Ma- gloughlin, Nova Starr, and Brandon Fry for being great friends.
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