Séminaire avec Zahra Mirrazi (University of Göttingen)

Title: Semantics of Attitude Predicates & Neg-Raising

A central debate in the semantics of attitude predicates concerns whether they should be analyzed as universal quantifiers over possible worlds, following the Hintikkan tradition, or as eventive predicates that combine with their complements via Predicate Modification, as proposed by content-based approaches (Kratzer 2006; Moulton 2009; Bondarenko 2022; Bondarenko & Elliott 2026a, b). In this talk, we use the distinctive properties of Neg-Raising Predicates (NRPs) to evaluate these competing approaches. In particular, we focus on the fact that NRPs, unlike other attitude predicates, license strong NPIs and anti-additive inference. We argue that content-based approaches cannot capture these properties without abandoning their core assumptions, whereas the traditional Hintikkan approach offers a more straightforward explanation, albeit at the cost of positing lexical ambiguity among attitude predicates.