Watch the attitude: Embedding and role-shift in ASL

Abstract

Much of the work on attitude predicates, spawned by Hintikka (1962), treatsthem as a uniform class – quantifiers over possible worlds. However, recently a number of suggestions have been made that highlight different subclasses. Here we present novel data from American Sign Language (ASL) that support a differentiation made by Anand and Hacquard (2008) concerning the objectivity and subjectivity of their complements, while also bringing into focus a special property of Sign Languages – role shift.