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Desires, wishes and hopes – Desiderative predicates and presuppositions

  • André Meinunger EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: October 20, 2017

Abstract

The expression of a desire – a wish, a request, a demand, one’s will – triggers a presupposition. This has grammatical consequences, such as mood choice in Romance, verbal positioning in Germanic or complementizer selection in Slavic. Desiderative predicates are argued to contain special features of (counter-) factivity. This explains the strikingly similar behavior of emotive factive and implicative predicates as well as volitional and request expressions; it also captures some common characteristics with negated affirmative predicates.

Funding statement: This work was supported by the German Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) (Grant Nr. 01UG0711)

Abbreviations

ind

indicative

neg

negation

NP

noun phrase

P

preposition

pres

present tense

prt

particle

refl

reflexive

sub

subjunctive

VP

verb phrase

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Published Online: 2017-10-20
Published in Print: 2017-10-26

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