On counterfactual attitudes: a case study of Taiwanese Southern Min

This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of counterfactual attitude verbs in Taiwanese Southern Min, showing the differences between this type of attitude verbs and those discussed by Anand and Hacquard (2013). I propose that the semantics of counterfactual attitude verbs is composed of two components, a doxastic assertion and a counterfactual felicity condition, the former of which makes them pattern with representational attitude verbs (Bolinger 1968) whereas the latter differentiates them. This latter component is also responsible for the epistemic licensing behavior of counterfactual attitude verbs, that is, such attitude verbs allowing epistemic necessity but not possibility modals in their complement clauses. This paper contributes to the study of attitude verbs by singling out counterfactual attitudes from the representational category and motivating a finer-grained typology of attitudes based on the distributional facts concerning epistemic licensing.