Factivity Alternation of Attitude ‘know’ in Korean, Mongolian, Uyghur, Manchu, Azeri, etc. and Content Clausal Nominals

Attitude verbs describe mental states of their subject in relation to a proposition codified by their clausal complement. In this paper, we describe the behavior of such verbs in Karitiana, a Tupian language spoken in Brazil. Recently, it has been noted in the literature that embedded clauses with nominal features seem to lead to a factive reading of these verbs. In Karitiana, all embedded clauses are nominalized since they lack many clausal features, and conversely exhibit nominal distribution and behavior. We propose a structure with an N head for embedded clauses in Karitiana, which accounts for their morphological behavior and also explains why these constructions behave as strong islands. Judgments of contradiction with attitude verbs of Karitiana were collected and the results show that they fall into two categories: one that obligatorily entails the truth of the embedded clause and another that favors it, but that does not require it obligatorily. This shows that nominalization of embedded clauses seems to be tied to the presence of factive entailments, but this alone is not a sufficient condition to force a factive reading of the matrix attitude verb.

The cognitive attitude verb KNOW in most languages typically selects for a factive complement (Kiparsky and Kiparsky 1970). It is noted in the literature (Lee 1978, 1999; Kiefer 1978, Őzyildiz 2017, a.o.), however, that KNOW in some languages may take various forms of complements and that factivity varies depending on the complement types. An obvious generalization made is that nominalized complements tend to convey a factive reading, while non-nominal ones tend not to (Kastner 2015). This work makes it clear that for a clause selected by KNOW to have a factive reading, it not only bears a nominal feature but also carries a structural case. This paper additionally points out the following three issues and discusses their theoretical implications as to the syntax and semantics of attitudinal predicate constructions: (i) Cognitive attitude verbs may simultaneously take a nominalized clause and a predicational clause; (ii) The non-factive KNOW in the three languages commonly displays neg-raising and naturally anti-rogativity, siding with doxastic (belief) verbs; (iii) Lexically negated forms of these verbs select only for a nominalized (factive) clause.