The Neg-Raising and Veridicality Project, which is being carried out as part of the NRT DESE program and sponsored by Professor Aaron White, aims to carry out an empirical analysis of neg-raising and veridical inferences, and how the occurrences of these sorts of inferences may be related to belief/desire components of various predicates. Specifically, this project has three primary goals:
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Collecting large-scale data on belief/desire components of predicates in negative/positive contexts, using human acceptability judgments, to determine which components are foregrounded or backgrounded.
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Developing a scalable model for analyizing this data, to gain empirical insight on theoretical proposals in the linguistics literature regarding neg-raising and veridical inferences and relationships to syntactic acceptability judgments.
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Extending the MegaNegRaising dataset to include data on semi-neg-raising behavior (e.g. “I don’t know that John left” -> “I think that John didn’t leave”) using human acceptability judgments.
Our full report of what we were able to accomplish over the course of the Spring 2020 semester can be found here.