Last Thursday (March 20th), Ziling Zhu successfully defended her dissertation on “Deriving and Suspending Factivity.” The abstract for this defense can be found below.
Some clause-embedding predicates are factive, presupposing the truth of their complements. This dissertation investigates how the factivity of attitude predicates arises or disappears, focusing on emotive factives, verbs of discovery, and communication verbs.
A key question concerns why the factivity of emotive predicates (e.g., ‘regret’) and verbs of discovery (e.g., ‘realize’) disappears in false-belief contexts (as in “Falsely believing that Mary got married, John regrets that she is no longer single”). This dissertation offers two accounts to explain this puzzle, namely, a ‘believe’-based account and a ‘know’-based account.
In the ‘believe’-based account, ‘regret’ and ‘realize’ are lexically encoded with a backgrounding operator which turns their at-issue meanings into presuppositions. Following assumptions in the canonical treatments of presupposition projection in attitude contexts (Karttunen 1974, Heim 1992, Sudo 2014), this ‘believe’-based account derives factive inferences as context-sensitive pragmatic implicatures.
The ‘know’-based account, in contrast, posits that those predicates are lexically encoded with a factive ‘know’ relation, asserted as a conditional antecedent in ‘regret’ and being denied in ‘realize’. In simple-contradiction contexts, accommodating the factivity of ‘know’ locally results in presupposition failure or pragmatic deviance; however, in belief contexts, such local accommodation may succeed due to modal subordination (a la Roberts 1989).
This dissertation also investigates the factive inference of the communication verb ‘tell’. The key observation is that ‘tell’ presupposes factivity only when a ‘tell’-proposition bears matrix polarity focus, that is, when the question under discussion (QUD) concerns whether the telling event occurred. This QUD, combined with the topic-relatedness of ‘tell’, enables the ‘tell’-complement to serve as an utterance topic. Building on insights from nominal topics and clausal nominalization, this account argues that when a ‘tell’-complement serves as a topic, it is nominalized by a null FACT-operator (Elbourne 2013), which triggers a factivity presupposition.
Congratulations, Ziling! We look forward to seeing where you’ll go after Rutgers!