Making claims, decisions, and other things

Kalle Müller (Université Côte d'Azur)

This paper investigates the compositional semantics of make the N that constructions with content-bearing nouns (e.g. claim, assumption, comment, remark, decision, choice). In particular, it is concerned with the question of uniqueness and role of the definite determiner. I will argue that in these cases, make as a light verb selects unique kinds of attitudinal objects as arguments and propose an analysis based on the causation of a realization state in which an individual object realizes the respective attitudinal kind. Then I will contrast this construction with their respective full verb counterpart.