Are there factive predicates? An empirical investigation

Abstract:Properties of the content of the clausal complement have long been assumed to distinguish factive predicates like know from nonfactive ones like think (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, inter alia). There is, however, disagreement about which properties define factive predicates, as well as uncertainty about whether the content of the complement of particular predicates exhibits the properties attributed to the content of the complement of factive predicates. This has led to a lack of consensus about which predicates are factive, a troublesome situation given the central role that factivity plays in linguistic theorizing. This article reports six experiments designed to investigate two critical properties of the content of the complement of clause-embedding predicates, namely projection and entailment, with the goal of establishing whether these properties identify a class of factive predicates. We find that factive predicates are more heterogeneous than previously assumed and that there is little empirical support from these experiments for the assumed categorical distinction between factive and nonfactive predicates. We discuss implications of our results for formal analyses of presuppositions, one area where factivity has played a central role. We propose that projection is sensitive to meaning distinctions between clause-embedding predicates that are more fine-grained than factivity.