Factive Research Articles

The ambiguity of sapere

This paper discusses occurrences of Italian sapere ‘know’ in mental state attributions (sa). Following the proposal of Tsohatzidis (2012) for ‘knows’, the hypothesis put forward is that sa, when used in mental state attributions, is lexically ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense: when sa is used in its factive sense, a sentence such as X sa che p ‘X sa that p’ entails p, whereas, when sa is used in its non-factive sense, a sentence having the same surface form does not entail p. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by some tests traditionally used to ascertain cases of lexical ambiguity. Moreover, it will be shown that there are syntactic environments where only one of the two readings is allowed, which also seems to confirm the hypothesis that there are two sa, a factive one and a non-factive one, which select different structures. (Less)

Is Understanding Factive?

Is Understanding Factive?

No State A Priori Known to Be Factive is Mental*

No State <i>A Priori</i> Known to Be Factive is Mental*

Some Steps in the Acquisition of Factive and Implicative Sentences

Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1975), pp. 475-485

Knowledge, Presupposition, and Pragmatic Implicature

It is widely accepted that knowledge is factive, but two different understandings of “factivity” should be distinguished, namely, the implication version and the presupposition version. While the former only takes the truth of P as a necessary requirement for “S knows that P,” the latter considers it also necessary for “S does not know that P.” In this paper, I argue against presupposition and defend implication. More specifically, I argue against Wang and Tai’s defense of the presupposition version as presented in a recent paper and propose a pragmatic response to the “persistence problem” of implication. In other words, my positive proposal is an account of implication plus pragmatic implicature. To conclude, I use my version to analyze Wang and Tai’s distinction between inner skepticism and outer skepticism. My conclusion is that, after abandoning presupposition, we can identify two types of intermediate skepticism between Wang and Tai’s inner and outer skepticism.

Mythology of the Factive

Mythology of the Factive

Il congiuntivo nelle frasi subordinate in italiano antico

This paper has carried out a corpus-based investigation of subjunctive in Old Italian texts. Following modern generative syntactic theories we have distinguished two types of subjunctive: intensional (and subtypes thereof: volitive, epistemic and factive) and polar. We have documented the extent and variation of occurrences of subjunctive: a) governed by lexical categories: verbs, nouns, and adjectives (intensional); b) in the syntactic domain of selected operators such as negation (polar). On the basis of data extracted from the corpus we observed two main generalizations. The first is distributional: in Old Italian the subjunctive mood could appear in fewer context types than in Modern Italian (although the token frequency for a given type can be even very high). The second is interpretive: in Old Italian subjunctive expressed semantic dependency much more than it does today. Evidence for this is given by the almost complete absence of subjunctive in factive contexts (where in Modern Italian it can freely alternate with indicative basically without meaning difference, thus working as a pure marker of syntactic subordination) and the rich array of polar subjunctives (which are semantically licensed in a way similar to negative polarity items).

Factives, blindspots and some paradoxes

Factives, blindspots and some paradoxes

Fitch's factives

Fitch's factives