A Crosslinguistic Database for Combinatorial and Semantic Properties of Attitude Predicates (2023)

Abstract: We introduce a cross-linguistic database for attitude predicates, which references their combinatorial (syntactic) and semantic properties. Our data allows assessment of cross-linguistic generalizations about attitude predicates as well as discovery of new typological/cross-linguistic patterns. This paper motivates empirical and theoretical issues that our database will help to address, the sample predicates and the properties that it references, as well as our design and methodological choices. Two case studies illustrate how the database can be used to assess validity of cross-linguistic generalizations.

## introduction attitude predicates are natural language expressions characterized by the fact that they combine with sentential complements and that they ascribe to their subject an attitude. they are used to talk about what people believe, wonder, hope, or say. these predicates exhibit a variety of combinatorial restrictions in terms of the types of clauses they can combine with. for example, they can be distinguished into three classes based on whether they are compatible with declarative or question complements: antirogatives like believe combine only with declaratives, in (1a). rogatives like wonder combine only with interrogatives, in (1b). and responsives like know combine with either, in (1c). other instances of combinatorial restrictions include responsive predicates that are compatible with constituent questions @xcite while being incompatible with whether questions, e.g., be amazed or be surprised, and predicates that differ in terms of whether they are compatible with indicative or subjunctive complements in languages that make the distinction. in a tradition tracing back at least to @xcite ), attitude ascriptions have been studied extensively in the philosophical and the linguistic literature. one recent strand of research argues that differences in the combinatorial properties of attitude predicates, rather than being accidental and idiosyncratic facts, can be explained generally on the basis of their semantic properties @xcite @xcite @xcite . we elaborate on some of these semantic properties and how they might relate to attitude verbs' combinatorial properties in section 2. a second, intimately connected strand of research aims to uncover semantic properties that classes of attitude predicates have in common (in addition to places of variation), within a given language's lexicon and across languages, i.e., crosslinguistic universals in the attitude domain @xcite @xcite . in this paper, we present a database that will allow researchers to address these questions and explore other linguistic properties of attitude predicates in a crosslinguistic way. the database references a sample of semantic and combinatorial properties of approximately 50 attitude predicates from 15 languages. the values of these properties are based on introspective judgments of native speakers of each language, and are collected by means of a questionnaire. they are summarized in tables in csv format, one per language and speaker, which are accompanied by text documents that contain the linguistic examples that motivate the speaker's responses and reference additional facts about the data (e.g., the variety of the language spoken by the native speaker consultant, particular clause type distinctions available in the language, etc.). this resource adds to a set of existing databases about the properties of attitude predicates: the mega databases megaacceptability (white and rawlins, 2016), megaveridicality (white and rawlins, 2018), meganegraising (an and white, 2020), megaintensionality @xcite and megaorientation @xcite , as well as the zas database of clause-embedding predicates @xcite . the contribution of our database is novel in at least three respects. first, it enables a crosslinguistic exploration of the properties of attitude predicates. this is important because generalizations that concern these predicates are often formulated on the basis of a single language and yet, given their nature, are expected to hold crosslinguistially. second, it is the same speakers that provide the introspective judgments that underlie the semantic and combinatorial properties that are tested. to the extent that we can assume that these judgments come from the same source grammar, within speaker and within language comparisons can be made consistently. it has been shown that speakers may differ from one another in terms of how strongly a linguistic expression displays some property, and that correlations between syntactic or semantic properties may ultimately depend on this gradient perception @xcite . third, the quantitative component of the database (the summary tables in csv format) is supported by a qualitative component (the text documents with examples and other considerations supporting/qualifying the consultant's judgments). this makes it possible not only to draw broad generalizations, but also to examine the properties of specific predicates in more depth. we would finally like to highlight that the dataset may be used for a broad range of applications in nlp, including but not limited to improving and evaluating the performance of natural language understanding and machine translation systems. this, we believe, is particularly valuable in that our dataset references several 'low resource' languages, for which such systems might perform poorly. outline section 2 of this paper presents the semantic properties of attitude predicates included in our database and how these have been argued to relate to these predicates' combinatorial properties. section 3 references the predicates that we have included, as well as the response categories that were used to elicit these predicates' semantic and combinatorial properties. section 4 contains practical information about how the database is formatted, can be accessed, and further contributed to. section 5 presents two case studies illustrating how the database can be used to test generalizations concerning attitude predicates. section 6 concludes. (we draw attention to limitations in the appendix.) ## semantic properties this section introduces the semantic properties of attitude predicates included in our database and relevant generalizations about them in the literature. a predicate v is veridical iff x vs that s entails s. for instance, know is veridical, but be certain is not: (2) entails that it is raining but (3) does not. alice knows that it is raining. (3) alice is certain that it is raining. veridicality is argued to correlate with the ability to take interrogative complements (e.g., @xcite . a predicate is projective under negation (or projective for short) if one can infer the complement when the predicate is negated. for instance, be happy and be surprised are projective (4). for instance, think and believe are negraising (5), whereas know and be sure are not (6). it has been suggested that neg-raising predicates are generally anti-rogative, and several theoretical explanations for this have been proposed @xcite @xcite . many predicates, such as be happy and hope, have meanings that intuitively involve a notion of preference. several formal semantic accounts characterize preferentiality in terms of focus sensitivity and gradability @xcite @xcite . a predicate v is focus sensitive if its truth conditions can be influenced by the placement of focus in the embedded clause. for instance, be happy and hope are focus sensitive because the two sentences in (7) need not be true at the same time: mary might be the best among syntax teachers, but syntax might not be the best among subjects mary can teach. there is no consensus on exactly how to characterize emotive factives (see, e.g., @xcite , for discussion), but it is uncontroversial that when they take a declarative complement, the attitude holder must believe that the complement is true (13). ( 13) alice is happy/surprised that it is raining ⇒ alice believes that it is raining there is a complication, however. it is unclear what level of credence believe corresponds to, since this attitude predicate can often be used when the subject is not fully certain that the complement is true (e.g., @xcite . therefore, in our database we instead directly test the compatibility between a predicate and various levels of credence. for instance, a predicate v always implies likelihood if x vs that s entails that x considers s more likely than not s. for question-embedding predicates, one impor-tant semantic property is what can be inferred about the relation between the subject's belief and possible answers to the embedded question. some predicates, such as know, entail that there is a possible answer to the embedded question that the subject believes ( 14 ). such predicates are belief-implying. some predicates, such as wonder, entail that there is no possible answer that the subject believes (15). such predicates are ignorance-implying. other predicates, such as care, are neutral wrt belief and ignorance. alice cares (about) who won can be true with or without alice having a belief as to who won @xcite . v is q-to-p distributive if x vs q entails x vs that p for some p that is a potential answer to q. for instance, if alice is certain (about) which player won, then there must be some player y such that alice is certain that y won. note that q-to-p veridical predicates must be q-to-p distributive but not vice versa. for instance, be certain is q-to-p distributive but not q-to-p veridical. finally, v is p-to-q distributive if x vs that p, where p is a possible answer to a question q, entails x vs q. for instance, alice is certain that bob won entails alice is certain (about) which player won. @xcite propose that responsive predicates are all q-to-p distributive, whereas @xcite propose, instead, that they are all p-to-q distributive (see section 5.2 for further discussion). before concluding this section, we note that the semantic properties described here can in principle be applied to predicates in any language. similarly, class verbs communication accept, announce, argue, assert, claim, complain, deny, explain, inform, tell, whisper, write doxastic agree, assume, believe, (be) certain, (be) convinced, doubt, expect, forget, know, learn, prove, (be) right, suspect, think, (be) unaware, (be) wrong the empirical generalizations proposed in the literature make crosslinguistic predictions, even though they were typically motivated by data from english or a few well-studied languages. testing such predictions in a wider range of languages is crucial to assess the validity of existing proposals. ## design of the crosslinguistic database our database is designed to assess empirically the kinds of crosslinguistic generalizations described in section 2. furthermore, it will possibly enable discovery of previously unnoticed correlations, in particular ones involving interactions between multiple properties. in this section, we introduce the general design of the database. we will also briefly discuss practical aspects of data collection. ## two case studies we discuss two case studies using our database. although strong conclusions cannot be drawn from the limited sample we currently have, as a proof of concept, they show how our database informs debates about crosslinguistic generalizations. ## conclusions we have presented our crosslinguistic database for combinatorial and semantic properties of attitude predicates. as our case studies show, the database enables assessment of two types of crosslinguistic generalisations: one concerning correlations between semantic and combinatorial properties of attitude predicates and the other concerning general semantic constraints on attitude predicates. the database complements existing resources due to three features: (i) crosslinguistic data; (ii) enabling within-subject comparison across properties, and (iii) accompanying text documents that allow finegrained qualitative assessment of data.