Attitude verbs are notoriously nuanced and semantically complex. A major issue for linguists and philosophers in their study is the distribution of clausal complementation: some verbs seem to embed only declarative sentences (like believe), some seem to only embed interrogative sentences (like wonder), and some can embed either (like know). What factors determine what kinds of clauses an attitude can embed? And how stable are these properties across and within languages? This course will explore these questions through a broad cross-linguistic lens, with a primary eye on contemporary advances in the field, discussing the many nuanced properties of attitude predicates that seem to play a role in their embedding behavior, including modality, aspect, negation, factivity, and neg-raising. The course will also present the recent MECORE database on clausal embedding data to provide a scaffolding for students to begin collecting and analyzing data on clausal embedding on their own.

This course is complementary to the week 1 course “What sentences do”; both courses may be followed, but the week 1 course is not a prerequisite for understanding the week 2 course.