Attitude Reports

An important idea in generative grammar is that form does not always follow function; that is, not all syntactic behavior is explainable by appeal to semantic considerations. But some syntactic behavior is so explainable, and surely it is no accident that many of the verbs and adjectives we use for describing our mental lives have the ability to embed sentences or sentence-like constituents: it is emblematic of what philosophers of mind call intentionality, which is the capacity of the mind to representmind-external objects. Beliefs and desires, for example, have objects, and often those objects are of the sort that we can use sentences to name or describe them. Perhaps not all of the mental states and actions described by the words in (1) work like this in every situation. Maybe, for example, I can have undirected" anger (ultimately, this is a question for psychologists or philosophers, not linguists). But I can also be angry about something or angry that something is the case"--