Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

MIT Linguistics Colloquium 11/5 - Valentine Hacquard

Speaker: Valentine Hacquard, University of Maryland
Title: Epistemics, mood and attitudes
Date: Friday, November 05, 2010
Time: 3:30-5:00PM
Place: 32-155 (PLEASE NOTE ROOM)

Epistemic modals are notoriously difficult to embed. This talk will focus on epistemic modals in complements of attitudes verbs. I will show that epistemics can appear in the complements of some, but not all attitudes. A rough generalization is that they are prohibited in complements of verbs that select for subjunctive mood in Romance. I will present joint work with Pranav Anand that aims at explaining this generalization: why is the distribution of epistemics restricted, and what role, if any, does mood plays?