The Medium Is the Message? Tancredi and Sharvit on the semantics of attitude reports

Abstract

Among the ambiguities found in propositional attitude reports, some have to do with the possibility to interpret an expression either in the common idiom or in the idiolect of the attitude holder. Although this fact has been known for about two decades by now, apparently the first analysis where it is made central for the whole theory of interpreting attitude reports is that of (Tancredi, Sharvit 2022). It demonstrates impressive flexibility in generating interpretations, which results from treating the material of the subordinate clause as a linguistic object rather than a proposition, so that its interpretation within the scope of an attitude predicate may differ from its interpretation as a separate sentence not only denotationally (i.e. the denotations might be different in the attitude worlds vs. in the actual world) but also significationally – as regards the content of its subexpressions. The present paper, apart from giving a historical overview (§1) and introducing Tancredi and Sharvit’s theory briefly (§2), provides criticisms of some of its features, such as its lack of direct reference to possible worlds (§3) and the necessity of syntactic movement in order for certain interpretations to be ruled out (§4). Furthermore, we demonstrate how a theory in which the denotational and significational aspects are both manipulable but kept separate can be used to develop a doctrine of scales related to attitude reports and, correspondingly, of scalar implicatures triggered by them (§5).