Investigating the properties of clause-embedding predicates in Polish

Abstract

This paper’s main focus lies on the compositional semantics of clause-embedding predicates, i.e. verbs or verb-like expressions that represent a relationship between a subject and a proposition. It provides an improved characterisation of the selectional behaviour of the classes of responsive and anti-rogative predicates in terms of their semantic properties. I propose refinements of the hypotheses by Uegaki and Sudo [US19] and Roelofsen and Uegaki [RU21], that are falsified by empirical data. My new proposals are that all non-veridical and positively preferential predicates are anti-rogative and that all responsive predicates are either Q-to-P or P-to-Q distributive. The latter hypothesis can be alternatively formulated as: “sentences with corresponding interrogative and declarative complements embedded under the same predicate are always related by entailment”.