On Belief Reports in Bangla
Arka Banerjee · 2019
This paper studies various belief predicates in Bangla. In analyzing belief predicates in general, the Hintikkan universal quantification over doxastic worlds is executed in literatures. But, this might not be true across the board. The variations in strength that Bangla belief predicates show cannot be taken care of only by the universal quantification over worlds. Following Hegarty (2011), we show that a generalized quantifier approach becomes rather useful in analyzing the Bangla belief predicates with respect to a scale of certainty. The paper also zooms in on two kinds of reading that Bangla belief predicates exhibit. These two kinds are - a bare reading and an eventive reading (see Hegarty 2011). We extend this discussion of these two reading types to address the famous parenthetical vs. non-parenthetical distinction (Simons 2007, Jary 2010) of belief predicates. Our paper shows that the former, i.e. the bare/event-less reading can correspond to the parenthetical type, while the latter, i.e. the eventive reading can associate itself to the non-parenthetical kind.