Picky predicates: why believe doesn’t like interrogative complements, and other puzzles

Abstract

It is a long-standing puzzle why predicates like believe embed declarative but not interrogative complements (e.g., Bill believes that/*whether Mary left ) and why predicates like wonder embed interrogative but not declarative complements (e.g., Bill wonders whether/*that Mary left ). This paper shows how the selectional restrictions of a range of predicates (neg-raising predicates like believe , truth-evaluating predicates like be true , inquisitive predicates like wonder , and predicates of dependency like depend on ) can be derived from semantic assumptions that can be independently motivated.

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