Triviality and Clausal Selection

In my work I argue that triviality and L(ogical)-analyticity are responsible for many, if not all, selectional restrictions of clause-embedding predicates: certain combinations of predicates and clauses might be syntactically well-formed, but lead to trivial meanings, and such semantic deviance leads to ungrammaticality. The idea that semantic triviality can lead to ungrammaticality can help us explain why clauses that are verbal modifiers tend to be bigger in size, why polarity-sensitive subjunctives appear only with some clause-embedding verbs, and why stative ‘think’ cannot embed questions. I also proposed that true conjunction of full-sized embedded clauses (CPs) is impossible in natural languages due to the meanings of elements in the clausal left peripheries: such conjunctions are always either trivially false or redundant, leading to their ungrammaticality. This proposal allows us to explain a cross-linguistic generalization: whenever ‘CP and CP’ strings are possible, the conjunction is compatible with Conjunction Reduction and has wide scope with respect to the embedding predicate.