NPI licensing in attitude reports with content-bearing nominals

Abstract

Noun complement clauses as in the claim that pigs are dirty can host weak negative polarity items like any and ever that are licensed from the matrix clause. This property is shared with attitude verbs but contrasts with relative clauses to singular definite nouns, which is surprising in the light of recent predicate analyses of complement clauses. This puzzle has recently been observed by Sharvit (2024). In this paper, I show how a kind-based approach to attitudes can readily account for this.