Knowing and Believing Things: What DP-Complementation Can Tell us about the Meaning and Composition of (Factive) Attitudes

Abstract In the Hintikkan tradition, attitude verbs are viewed as relations between individuals and propositions. Previous work on know believe with Content DPs like rumour has tended to treat CP vs. DP polysemy. this paper, I show that polysemy runs into conceptual empirical problems, propose instead a new decompositional approach know-verbs, which avoids polysemy; linking both same lexical root, describes, broadly speaking, acquaintance. This analysis thus provides an explicit compositional morpho-semantic link accounts for interpretation of objects acquaintance, further captures idea knowledge, factivity more broadly, is tied acquaintance situation, res ( Kratzer 2002, a.o.). Based detailed examination morpho-syntax complements believe, can either combine in fashion CPs, direct object (saturating propositional argument slot, Uegaki 2016), or indirect object, via type attitudinal applicative (proposed here). The former option defined latter agentive DPs, so-called Source DPs. Together, these proposals account observation sentences varies depending (believe referee), whereas types interpreted At core current proposal differ fundamentally at level structure internal composition, different routes; contrary uniform approaches believe. Whereas believe-verbs describe intensional content, require external licensing mechanisms know-verbs complex relations, anchored holder’s (abstract concrete) world, make reference part their structure. also builds adds previous insights about connections factivity, DP-complementation, question-embedding.