Meaning Meeting - Nicholas Fleisher / Gradability and factivity
Meaning Meeting - Nicholas Fleisher / Gradability and factivity
February 27, the Meaning Meeting welcome Nicholas Fleisher, Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, who will present his recent work on interactions between gradability and factivity. You won't regret it one bit if you come!
Semifactives in Comparatives
This is more complicated than I realized. How are we to understand the status of realize’s complement in a sentence like this? What sort of relationship must this complement bear to its matrix environment, in light of realize’s status as a cognitive factive/semifactive predicate (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, Karttunen 1971)? Comparative constructions, I suggest, do much to illuminate the nature of semifactives and their presuppositions. Specifically, I propose that semifactives support graded awareness—knowledge of something less, but not more, than the full truth—while requiring that their complement be informationally consistent with the matrix environment, rather than presupposed true. The picture that emerges fits naturally with pragmatic approaches to presupposition generation and projection (Beaver 2010, Simons et al. 2017, Degen & Tonhauser 2022) and depends on sensitivity to scalar polarity and orientation (Kennedy 2001).