The role of veridicality and factivity in clause selection
Aaron Steven White, Kyle Rawlins
May 2018 

This paper investigates the relationship between clausal selection and two lexical semantic properties that have been claimed to be important in determining such selection: factivity (Hintikka 1975) and veridicality (Egre 2008). Specifically, these properties have been suggested to be connected to responsivity: selection of both declarative and interrogative complements. Our investigation builds on the MegaAttitude dataset of White & Rawlins (2016), which contains experimentally-collected acceptability judgments for effectively every English verb that embeds clauses, in a large set of frames. Based on these acceptability judgments, we collect a new dataset of veridicality judgments for all English verbs that embed declarative clauses (available at http://megaattitude.io). This allows a systematic, large-scale comparison of veridicality judgments and selectional patterns. We show that factivity and veridicality do not correlate with responsivity when considering the entirety of the lexicon but that they do correlate with other selectional patterns – in particular, selection of DP direct and indirect objects.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004012 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the 48th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society
keywords:	factivity, veridicality, clause, selection, distribution, megaattitude, propositional attitude verb, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [May 2018] v1 [May 2018]
Downloaded:	813 times

 

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