On the source of displacement: two meanings of embedded CPs

Abstract This paper provides an argument for the view that the source of displacement in attitude and speech reports is within the embedded clause (Kratzer 2006, Anand and Hacquard 2008, Moulton 2009, Bogal-Allbritten 2016, Elliott 2020a). The main empirical observations come from examining Korean clauses that combine with nouns like opinion (content nouns, Cont-NPs) and clauses that combine with nouns like situation (situation nouns, Sit-NPs). I argue that embedded CPs that combine with these nouns (i) are nominal modifiers, and (ii) only sentences with Cont-CPs involve displacement —shift of evaluation of the embedded proposition to a set of situations determined by the noun. I argue that Cont-CPs being modifiers implies that these clauses must be the source of displacement, and propose that it is introduced by an overt morpheme—the so-called declarative marker , which we see in the structure of Cont-CPs but not Sit-CPs. Based on data from Buryat, English and Russian, I argue that the two meanings of embedded CPs that we observe in Korean exist in other languages too, and suggest that the cross-linguistic variation in these constructions is morphological in nature. While the syntax and semantics of constructions with Cont-NPs and Sit-NPs are uniform, languages vary in whether they have overt morphology for the Cont head inside the embedded clause.