ABSTRACT

How is perspectival content grammatically encoded? Theories of perspectival meaning can be divided into two classes based on their answer to this question. On one side are “syntactic” analyses in which perspective-sensitive predicates have a distinct semantic type and the perspectival anchor is realized as a syntactic argument, as in standard contextualist approaches. On the other side are “non-syntactic” analyses which afford no special semantic type or syntactic argument structure to perspectival predicates and instead capture perspective sensitivity at the level of assessment or use, as in relativist or pragmatic approaches. In this chapter, we respond to an empirical challenge for the latter approach from Sæbø (2009), who uses patterns of acceptability in complex complements of subjective attitude verbs to argue that only a syntactic analysis can accurately predict when perspectival content projects and when it does not. We begin by expanding on the data originally considered by Sæbø and arguing that a syntactic account cannot be extended to cover the full pattern of projection. We then show that it is possible to augment the pragmatic theory of perspectival content articulated in Kennedy and Willer (2016, 2019) with a simple and intuitive compositional semantics, which accurately captures the full pattern of projection and flows naturally from a general view of how perspective-sensitive meaning updates a context.