Propositional attitude reports are sentences built around clause-embedding psychological verbs, like Kim believes that it's raining or Kim wants it to rain. These interact in many intricate ways with a wide variety of semantically relevant grammatical phenomena, and represent one of the most important topics at the interface of linguistics and philosophy, as their study provides insight into foundational questions about meaning. This book provides a bird's-eye overview of the grammar of propositional attitude reports, synthesizing the key facts, theories, and open problems in their analysis. Couched in the theoretical framework of generative grammar and compositional truth-conditional semantics, it places emphasis on points of intersection between propositional attitude reports and other important topics in semantic and syntactic theory. With discussion points, suggestions for further reading and a useful guide to symbols and conventions, it will be welcomed by students and researchers wishing to explore this fertile area of study.

A critical survey of key issues in the analysis of propositional attitude reports, a central topic in natural language semantics.

This volume, the fourth in the Current Research in Semantics/Pragmatics Interface series, is a collection of nine papers dealing with the topic of reporting on beliefs and other attitudes, and in particular with the issue of the semantics-pragmatics boundary dispute which is the core topic of the current research in the field. Written by highly-regarded philosophers of language and linguists working on theoretical semantics and pragmatics, it brings together works in the mainstream tradition of logical form and the contextualism-anticontextualism debate and the research on the role of intentions, conventions, goals, plans and cultural stereotypes in attitude ascriptions. The editor's introductory chapter gives a valuable overview of the work, discussing the importance of all these aspects of propositional attitude research and stressing their compatibility and interdependence.

Message-Attitude-Behavior Relationship explores the relationship between messages, attitudes, and behaviors. Emphasis is on alternative conceptualizations of various message strategies, cognitive and information processing models, and their relevance to the study of behavior. Innovative mathematical models are discussed to highlight stochastic and deterministic mathematical operators case in coextensive, sequential, and multidimensional arrays of systems state. Message strategies are cast in terms of social, psychological, and information processing constructs. Comprised of 11 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the research tradition dealing with messages, attitudes, and behaviors. The following chapters provide in-depth justification, supported by data analysis, for the use of various theoretical and methodological approaches to the message-attitude-behavior relationship. An atomized, stochastic model of the behavioral effects of message campaigns is then described, along with the foundations of cognitive theory and a constructivist analysis of the relationship between attitudes and behavior. An information-processing explanation of attitude-behavior inconsistency is also outlined. The link between mental states and social action is analyzed with respect to Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1953 book Philosophical Investigations. This monograph should be a valuable resource for both social and behavioral scientists engaged in behavioral research.

Objects and Attitudes develops a radically novel semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences, and quotation based on an ontology of attitudinal, modal, and phatic objects, entities such as claims, thoughts, intentions, desires, requests, utterances, as well as needs, obligations, permissions, offers, and abilities. It systematically pursues a methodology of descriptive metaphysics--specifically, natural language ontology--and argues that natural language reflects an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects rather than an ontology of abstract propositions. The book gives a new development of truthmaker semantics ("object-based truthmaker semantics"), for which attitudinal and modal objects provide specific support. The semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences and quotation pursues the emerging view that clausal complements do not generally act as proposition-referring terms but rather as predicates of the (content-bearing) object described by the embedding predicate. It also develops novel, truthmaker-based conceptions of facts and states of affairs, the referents of clauses on a secondary, nominal function. Objects and Attitudes pursues the syntactic view that attitude verbs are underlying complex predicates, consisting of a light verb and a noun for an attitudinal object. Within that view, it gives a new syntactic and semantic analysis of special quantifiers (something, several things) as complements of attitude verbs and verbs of saying, on which such quantifiers range over attitudinal or phatic objects.

Linked from the days of their origins, psychology and advertising developed as independent disciplines at almost the same time in the late nineteenth century. Providing an important arena in which psychologists have tested methods and theories, advertising has been a stimulus for research and development in such diverse specialties as learning and behavioral decision theory, psychometrics, perception, and social and mathematical psychology. Psychology, in turn, has contributed a wide assortment of tools, theories, and techniques to the practice of advertising. These contributions have found their place in virtually all areas of advertising practice -- stimulating creativity, evaluating the creative product, and informing the scheduling of media. Purposely eclectic, this volume presents new issues in consumer psychology and advertising such as the relationship between gender differences, cortical organization and advertising; new approaches to old issues such as attention as an epiphenomenon, and meta-analysis of comparative advertising research; and new applications of consumer psychology to other fields such as examining health behavior as consumer behavior, affect and political advertising, and the relationship between advertising and eating disorders. This volume is the result of the Sixth Annual Advertising and Consumer Behavior Conference, which was designed to bring together researchers and practitioners from both psychology and advertising. Chapter contributions are made by professionals in advertising and marketing, professors in psychology and marketing departments, and psychologists who consult for advertising and marketing organizations. Thus, the chapters represent a microcosm of the type of interaction that has characterized the interface of psychology and advertising for more than a hundred years.