Talks and presentations

Clausal Complements and Copular Clauses

March 01, 2012

Talk, Philosophy Work in Progress Seminars,The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

I present a puzzle for giving a compositional semantics for ‘That’-cluases in accounting for their occurances in three types of contructions. a. as the complements to verbs, b. as the complements to nouns, and c. as post-copulars. I argue that none of the current theories of the semantics of ‘that’-clauses can account for this puzzle, and further, that no simple type, or freely available type shifter, could be given to ‘that’-clauses which would solve this puzzle.