13 December 2019, Cool Logic, Angelica Hill

The literature on question-embedding predicates has generally focused on the restrictions of certain predicates and the complements they can take as argument. However, the discussion becomes even more convoluted when we take the analysis cross-linguistically. My presentation explores a construction that exists in Spanish, but not in English, which allows a speaker to unambiguously report a question that this construction demands a more detailed analysis of question-embedding predicates. I will present such an analysis as well as introduce a test in order to highlight a correlation between a property shared by all verbs that share this construction that take this construction, which is not shared by predicates that do not. It's going to be very verby!