Investigating semantic and selectional properties of clause-embedding predicates in Polish
Tomasz Klochowicz

Abstract:
This thesis’s main objects of study are natural language predicates that can embed clauses. These verbs or verb-like expressions usually represent some relation between the subject of a sentence and a proposition. Clause-embedding predicates differ in the types of clauses they can embed. The challenge for the compositional semantics of these predicates is to explain these differences in terms of their semantic properties by postulating general constraints. Since clause-embedding predicates occur in many languages, the postulated constraints should be verified against cross-linguistic data. In this project, I created a database of clause-embedding predicates from the Polish language using the methodology by Uegaki et al. (2022) and verified the constraints postulated in the literature against it. As a result of this procedure, I propose two new constraints, which refine the existing hypotheses that turned out to be false: 1. All non-veridical positive preferential predicates are anti-rogative. 2. Interrogative and declarative complements of all responsive predicates are always related by entailment. Moreover, I discuss several Polish predicates that are worth researching further. What is more, I performed an empirical study on the predicate "spodziewa si" (eng: "to expect" ), which suggests that the predicates and their semantic properties may stand in relation different than simple binary satisfaction and that more empirical research should be performed to properly investigate this relation.