Everyone's been wondering what are the mechanisms for interpreting embedded root clauses in German and English…

This paper compares three types of embedded root clause (verb second in complement clauses, embedded imperatives and embedded inverted interrogatives) in German and English. It will describe in detail how these constructions differ from their non-root counterparts syntactically and pragmatically, and how equivalent constructions in German and English differ from each other. I will then use Farkas's (2022) version of the Table model to formalise how the pragmatic characteristics of these constructions falls out from a mixture of the generations of a conventional implicature and language-specific rules on how perspectives may shift under attitude predicates. • The distribution of embedded root clauses in English and German is determined by language-specific pragmatic rules. • Embedded attitudes in German shift in terms of speaker perspective, but not addressee perspective. • As a result, German has no embedded inverted interrogatives despite having the requisite syntax for them.