Next Friday, April 5, at 10:30 h. in the Board Room of Philosophy (Building of the School of Psychology), Andrés Soria (Institute Jean Nicod, Paris) and Mora Maldonado (University of Edinburgh) will talk about «The Puzzle of Reflexive Belief Construction in Spanish», in the seminar TeC FiloLab.
You can find a draft of the work in this link.
Abstract
The Reflexive Belief Construction in Spanish, built by adjoining the reflexive pronoun «se» to the verb «creer» (believe), displays a puzzling interpretive behavior. When unembedded, «creerse» triggers the inference that its complement clause is false. When embedded under negation, it triggers the inference that its complement clause is true. We first argue that the negative inference in the unembedded case is not due to the Maximize Presupposition! principle (Heim 1991), carving out the empirical profile of «creerse» along the way. We then explore two alternative explanations. The first is that «creerse» presupposes the falsity of its complement. The second is that «creerse» presupposes that the attitude holder is wrongly opinionated with respect to the embedded proposition. We argue that the first analysis fails unless it is supplemented with the syntactic account of neg-raising (Collins and Postal 2014), whereas the second analysis faces empirical challenges. We leave the resolution of this dilemma to future work.