Belief, intention and eventuality abstraction in the non-finite domain

Abstract

Crosslinguistically, some attitude predicates alternate between belief and intention readings depending on the morphosyntactic form of their complements. Building on Grano’s (2019, 2024) analysis of persuasion predicates, this paper examines a revealing case from Italian, where the verb convincere (‘convince’) displays a belief–intention alternation within the non-finite domain. The two readings correlate with distinct infinitival complements introduced by the prepositional complementizers di and a. We argue that the semantic contrast reflects a difference in the structural size of the embedded clause. Adopting Grano’s proposal that intention reports involve eventuality abstraction and causal self-referentiality, and assuming that modal quantification is introduced in the complement clause (Kratzer, 2006; Moulton, 2009; Bogal-Allbritten, 2016), we show that di-infinitives yield propositional complements via late eventuality closure, while structurally reduced a-infinitives introduce future-oriented modal quantification over inertia worlds, giving rise to intention readings.