Factive Islands and Interrogative Logical Triviality

On Factive Islands: Pragmatic Anomaly vs. Pragmatic Infelicity

Certain types of wh-phrases (e.g. how, why) cannot be extracted from the complement clause of a factive predicate, nor can they occur in situ within it (the factive island effect). This paper argues that the factive island effect is a pragmatic phenomenon, which follows from two independent factors: (i) the speaker’s expectation about possible answers of wh-interrogatives, and (ii) presuppositi...

factive verbs and protagonist projection

Nearly all philosophers agree that only true things can be known. But does this principle reect actual patterns of ordinary usage? Several examples in ordinary language seem to show that ‘know’ is literally used non-factively. By contrast, this paper reports ve experiments utilizing explicit paraphrasing tasks, which suggest that these non-factive uses are actually not literal. Instead, they ...

Factive Relative Clauses in Pulaar

Annotating Factive Verbs

We have created a scheme for annotating corpora designed to capture relevant aspects of factivity in verb-complement constructions. Factivity constructions are a well-known linguistic phenomenon that embed presuppositions about the state of the world into a clause. These embedded presuppositions provide implicit information about facts assumed to be true in the world, and are thus potentially v...

Factive Presuppositions, Accommodation and Information Structure

There are three ways to refer to a fact from the complement of a factive verb: 1) via abstract object anaphoric reference, or, with a full sentential complement that will be interpreted either 2) as a bound presupposition or 3) as triggering a presupposition of a fact that will have to be accommodated. Spoken corpus examples reveal that these three possibilities differ in relation to the type o...