The lexical and grammatical sources of neg-raising inferences
This work addresses a specific linguistic problem for researchers in semantics and syntax, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories with new data and modeling.
The study tackled the problem of understanding the sources of neg-raising inferences in English by collecting a large-scale dataset and developing a model to analyze verb and clause types, finding that these inferences arise from both predicate properties and subordinate clause structures.
We investigate neg(ation)-raising inferences, wherein negation on a predicate can be interpreted as though in that predicate's subordinate clause. To do this, we collect a large-scale dataset of neg-raising judgments for effectively all English clause-embedding verbs and develop a model to jointly induce the semantic types of verbs and their subordinate clauses and the relationship of these types to neg-raising inferences. We find that some neg-raising inferences are attributable to properties of particular predicates, while others are attributable to subordinate clause structure.