Which aspects of semantic interpretation are due to predicates’ denotations and which are due to the denotations of their arguments? One way to approach this issue is examining clause-embedding verbs in the context of temporal interpretation, which acts as an indicator of underlying syntactic structures and semantic frames. For example, in (1), is it a fact about a verb like regret or a fact about its subordinate clause that explains why the leaving can be yesterday but not tomorrow? Is it the same for want in (2)?
a. #Jo regretted leaving tomorrow.
b. Jo will regret leaving yesterday.
a. Jo wanted to leave tomorrow.
b. #Jo will want to leave yesterday.
One reason this question is difficult to answer is that a change in embedded clause structure sometimes alters the relevant pattern. For example, in (3a), remember patterns like regret, but in (3b), it patterns like want. In both, remember takes a participial (-ing) clause, unlike (1) and (2).
- a. Jo will remember leaving yesterday.
b. #Jo will remember to leave yesterday.
Is this an idiosyncratic fact about the verb remember or a general fact about the structure of its complements?
The MegaOrientation dataset consists of ordinal acceptability judgments for 898 clause-embedding verbs of English with a variety of nonfinite subordinate clause structures. For a detailed description of the dataset, the item construction and collection methods, and discussion of how to use a dataset on this scale to address questions in linguistic theory, please see the references below.
|2208||898||5||v1.1 (zip)||Moon & White 2020|
Aaron Steven White