Please join us this Friday as Tamara Vardomskaya from the Linguistics Department presents work on linguistic subjectivity and verbs of attitude and perception.
Date and time: Friday, February 5, 10:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.
Location: Rosenwald 208 (Linguistics seminar room)
Title: Subjectivity and find: a matter of perception or attitude?
Abstract:
The problem of how to analyze the subjectivity of predicates such as delicious, weird, or annoying has led to much recent discussion and debate. Saebo 2009 has brought to attention one key indicator of subjective predicates: their embeddability in small clauses under so-called subjective attitude verbs, such as the English construction find NP XP (Subjective-Find):
(1) I found beer delicious/?vegetarian.
However, a mostly-unasked question is what makes this construction select for subjectivity — and whether that can shed light on what exactly subjectivity is. In this talk I discuss the properties of the Subjective-Find construction, and how it differs from the homophonous discover construction (I found him dead), the construction with a finite-clause complement (I found that beer is delicious/vegetarian), and the seemingly parallel construction with consider (I considered beer vegetarian). I consider both its pragmatic features and its syntactic and semantic features in depth using data from both English and Russian.
I consider two possible analyses — that Subjective-Find is a perception verb similar to see or hear, and that Subjective-Find is an attitude verb similar to know, believe, think or consider. I show that neither of those analyses in themselves covers all the properties of Subjective-Find, and I workshop initial steps towards a combined analysis that can capture the advantages of both approaches.