Response-stance Predicates with Two Types of Finite Clauses in Bangla

Cattell’s (1978) notion of ‘stance’ verbs classifies verbs like deny, accept, agree, etc. as response stance verbs whose complements are familiar to discourse, but not necessarily true in actual reality. That their complements refer to familiar discourse referents can be dubbed as the familiarity criterion associated with this class of verbs. This paper investigates the compositional nitty-gritty of how ‘response stance predicates’ (henceforth, RSPs) select two types of finite clauses in Bangla (a.k.a. Bengali; Indo-Aryan). Bangla RSPs can take two types of finite clauses, viz. nominal-like clauses and adverbial-like clauses. In this paper, we provide detailed compositional analyses of these two types of clausal selection by Bangla RSPs, where the familiarity criterion is reflected in the combinatorics at syntax-semantics interface.