Abstract
In this squib, I evaluate the contradiction analysis (Abrusán in Natural Language Semantics 19(3):257–321, 2011, in Weak island semantics, 2014) and the necessary infelicity analysis (Oshima in Washio et al. (eds.), New frontiers in artificial intelligence, 2007; Schwarz and Simonenko in Natural Language Semantics 26(3–4):253–279, 2018b) of factive islands in light of a pattern that has not been previously discussed in the literature: questions about propositions. I argue that while the necessary infelicity approach can straightforwardly explain the acceptability of this kind of question, the contradiction account undergenerates, since it wrongly predicts their ungrammaticality. I claim that this prediction follows from the assumption that the domain of quantification contains contraries. Therefore, the main contribution of this squib is the observation that such an assumption cannot play an explanatory role in accounting for factive islands.
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Notes
Thanks to Matthew Barros (p.c.) for suggesting this scenario.
It should be noted that the picture presented here is incomplete. Of course, both proposals also explain other phenomena, such as degree questions. Nevertheless, these cases are outside the scope of this squib.
Abrusán assumes the existence of plural manners, similar to what is commonly assumed for individuals (Link 1983).
Unlike what is commonly assumed, Schwarz and Simonenko do not include the existence presupposition in the denotation of the question, but they conceive of it as a felicity condition.
As one anonymous reviewer suggests, there are certain cases in which a predicate seems to not require uniqueness because a multi-event interpretation is available. Consider for instance the example in (i):
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(i)
Who do you regret having danced with?
Following Schwarz and Simonenko, one could argue that this question is acceptable because the predicate you have danced with x can be true for more than one individual. However, the most natural reading seems to involve multiple events of dancing (i.e., first, you danced with John; then, you danced with Mary, and so on). Therefore, there seems to be a significant difference between this case and the deviant question in (23), since in that example there is only one event involved. I leave this issue open for future research.
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(i)
Schwarz and Simonenko point out that not all how-questions exhibits uniqueness. They offer the following example:
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(i)
How else could he have opened that coconut?
Nevertheless, they claim that this kind of data is consistent with their proposal. As for (i), they argue that the possibility modal obviates uniqueness. Thus, “even if there is a unique way in which he opened that coconut, there plausibly can be multiple ways in which he could have opened it” (Schwarz and Simonenko 2018b, p. 275). Under the necessary infelicity approach, the straightforward prediction is that the addition of could should ameliorate the extraction of how from a factive island. As they point out, this prediction seems to be borne out:
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(ii)
?How does she know that he could have opened that coconut?
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(i)
Thanks to Nicolás Lo Guercio (p.c.) for pointing this out.
Furthermore, this example also shows that assuming that the domain of propositions never contains contraries, as was suggested above, cannot be taken as an adequate alternative to preserve Abrusán’s account.
As shown, a crucial assumption in Abrusán’s analysis is that factive presuppositions in wh-questions project universally. This premise is based on the interpretation of questions about individuals like (9), repeated below in (ia), and is extended without further discussion to other cases, including manner and degree questions. However, universal projection of presuppositions in wh-questions is far from being an uncontroversial issue. As Schwarz and Simonenko (2018a) argue, there are some cases in which universal projection is absent, especially in questions with bare who or what. For instance, in (ib) it is harder to presuppose that Bill invited everyone.
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(i)
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a.
Who among those ten boys does Mary regret that Bill invited?
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b.
Who does Mary regret that Bill invited?
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a.
As for the question what do you regret? in the dialogue in (35), from an empirical point of view, it can be argued that in this case there is no universal projection either. However, for the sake of the argument, I follow Abrusán’s strategy and assume that the presupposition always holds for every entity of the domain.
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(i)
References
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable observations and suggestions. I am also grateful to Andrés Saab, Carlos Muñoz Pérez and the members of the BA-LingPhil group at Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico for their comments on the original manuscript.
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Verdecchia, M. Factive islands and questions about propositions. Nat Lang Semantics 30, 101–113 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-022-09187-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-022-09187-5