Abstract
Certain types of wh-phrases (e.g. how, why) cannot be extracted from the complement clause of a factive predicate, nor can they occur in situ within it (the factive island effect). This paper argues that the factive island effect is a pragmatic phenomenon, which follows from two independent factors: (i) the speaker’s expectation about possible answers of wh-interrogatives, and (ii) presuppositions induced by factive predicates. The proposed account illustrates a special kind of pragmatic infelicity (which I term “pragmatic anomaly”), which can be opposed to “contingent” pragmatic infelicity such as presupposition failure, violation of Gricean maxims, etc.
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Oshima, D.Y. (2007). On Factive Islands: Pragmatic Anomaly vs. Pragmatic Infelicity. In: Washio, T., Satoh, K., Takeda, H., Inokuchi, A. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4384. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69902-6_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69902-6_14
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