A Puzzle About Anti-Factives

Strohmaier D., Wimmer S.

Holton has drawn attention to a new semantic universal, according to which no natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. Because factives are universal across natural languages, Holton’s universal is part of a major asymmetry between factive and contrafactive attitude verbs. We previously proposed that this asymmetry arises partly because the meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. Here we extend our work by describing an additional computational experiment that further supports our hypothesis.

Degen J., Tonhauser J.

Glass L.

Colonna Dahlman R., van de Weijer J.

In the last few years, the traditional analysis of know as a factive verb has been lively debated by linguists and philosophers of language: several scholars have pointed out that know may be used non-factively in ordinary language. The aim of the present study is to expand this inquiry to other cognitive factive verbs than know , such as discover , realize , etc., and to investigate cross-linguistically the question of whether know and other cognitive factive verbs may occur in non-factive contexts, that is, in contexts where it is clear that the embedded proposition is false. Moreover, we investigate whether so-called evidential uses of cognitive factive verbs are acceptable across languages. We administered an online survey to native speakers of nine different languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish), and we found considerable cross-linguistic variation in the acceptability of the use of know and other cognitive factive verbs in non-factive contexts. For Italian and English, we put forward the claim that non-factive uses of cognitive factives instantiate a case of polysemy resulting from a process of semantic change that moves along a three-step pattern: from a factive sense to a more general non-factive sense to a non-factive sense characterized by an evidential function. • Cognitive factive verbs are investigated cross-linguistically. • Know and other cognitive factive verbs are used non-factively in ordinary language. • Cognitive factive verbs may be used to fulfill an evidential strategy. • An Acceptability Judgment Task was submitted to native speakers of nine languages. • Evidential uses may be a step in a process of defactivization of factive verbs.

Sander T.

Abstract The author argues that there is no such thing as a unique and general taxonomy of non-at-issue contents. Accordingly, we ought to shun large categories such as “conventional implicature” (Grice), “F-implicature” (Horn), “CI” (Potts), “Class B” (Tonhauser, Beaver, Roberts & Simons) or the like. As an alternative, we may, first, describe the “semantic profile” of linguistic devices as accurately as possible. Second, we may explicitly tailor our categories to particular theoretical purposes.

Giannakidou A., Mari A.

Sander T.

Levinson S.C.

Holton R.

Hyman J.

Hsiao P.K.

This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of counterfactual attitude verbs in Taiwanese Southern Min, showing the differences between this type of attitude verbs and those discussed by Anand and Hacquard (2013). I propose that the semantics of counterfactual attitude verbs is composed of two components, a doxastic assertion and a counterfactual felicity condition, the former of which makes them pattern with representational attitude verbs (Bolinger 1968) whereas the latter differentiates them. This latter component is also responsible for the epistemic licensing behavior of counterfactual attitude verbs, that is, such attitude verbs allowing epistemic necessity but not possibility modals in their complement clauses. This paper contributes to the study of attitude verbs by singling out counterfactual attitudes from the representational category and motivating a finer-grained typology of attitudes based on the distributional facts concerning epistemic licensing.

Schlenker P.

Recent semantic research has made increasing use of a principle, Maximize Presupposition, which requires that under certain circumstances the strongest possible presupposition be marked. This principle is generally taken to be irreducible to standard Gricean reasoning because the forms that are in competition have the same assertive content. We suggest, however, that Maximize Presupposition might be reducible to the theory of scalar implicatures. (i)First, we consider a special case: the speaker utters a sentence with a presupposition p which is not initially taken for granted by the addressee, but the latter takes the speaker to be an authority on the matter. Signaling the presupposition provides new information to the addressee; but it also follows from the logic of presupposition qua common belief that the presupposition is thereby satisfied (Stalnaker, Ling Philos 25(5–6):701–721, 2002). (ii) Second, we generalize this solution to other cases. We assume that even when p is common belief, there is a very small chance that the addressee might forget it (‘Fallibility’); in such cases, marking a presupposition will turn out to generate new information by re-establishing part of the original context. We also adopt from Raj Singh (Nat Lang Semantics 19(2):149–168, 2011) the hypothesis that presupposition maximization is computed relative to local contexts—and we assume that these too are subject to Fallibility; this accounts for cases in which the information that justifies the presupposition is linguistically provided. (iii) Finally, we suggest that our assumptions have benefits in the domain of implicatures: they make it possible to reinterpret Magri’s ‘blind’ (i.e. context-insensitive) implicatures as context-sensitive implicatures which just happen to be misleading.

HAZLETT A.

Dennett D.C.