Maša Močnik defended her dissertation (“Strange attitudes on top”) on August 5. Her committee was Kai von Fintel (chair), Amir Anvari, and Danny Fox. About her dissertation, Kai writes: ”In her extraordinarily rich investigation, Maša analyzes the interaction of several kinds of attitude predicates with embedded modal operators (epistemic, bouletic). In the first chapter, she studies the Slovenian doxastic possibility attitude ‘dopuščati’ (which lexicalizes the meaning of “consider it possible”) and the distribution of epistemic modals in its complement. In the second chapter, she explores the distribution of expressions of epistemic modality in the complement of desire predicates. In the third chapter, she extends and deepens earlier joint work with Rafael Abramovitz on the Koryak attitude verb ‘ivək’ and how its variable force/variable flavor arises, sometimes in interaction with modal meanings in its complement. In all three chapters, she deploys a brilliant combination of insights from modal logic and its application to natural language, recent philosophical work on (local) information-sensitive modality, and detailed empirical investigations of multiple, unrelated languages.”
Congratulations Maša!!