Knowing and believing things: what DP-complements can tell us about the argument structure and composition of (factive) attitudes
Kajsa Djärv
May 2021 

In the Hintikkan tradition, attitude verbs are viewed as relations between individuals and propositions, with differences among verbs understood in terms of the type of accessibility relation. Previous work on know and believe with Content DPs (e.g. Mary knows/believes the rumour that p) have analysed know DP vs. know CP as polysemy. In this paper, I show that polysemy runs into conceptual and empirical problems, and propose instead a new derivational approach to know-verbs, which avoids polysemy. The proposed analysis links know DP and know CP to the same lexical root, which describes, broadly speaking, acquaintance. This analysis thus provides an explicit and compositional morpho-semantic link between know DP and know CP that accounts for the interpretation of DP-complements as objects of acquaintance, and further captures the idea (e.g. Kratzer 2002, a.o.) that knowledge, and factivity more broadly, is tied to acquaintance with a situation, the res. I also examine the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of a different and less extensively studied type of DP-complement (Djärv’s 2019 Source DP, as in Mary believes/*knows Anna that p), and compare them with Content DPs. I show that whereas Content DPs and CPs both combine with verbs like believe as direct objects (via saturation of a propositional argument slot), Source DPs compose as indirect objects (via a type of attitudinal applicative head). Building on previous insights from Uegaki (2016), I explain the incompatibility of Source DPs with know-verbs in terms of a contrast with respect to question-embedding. The core insight of the current proposal is the idea that verbs like know and believe differ fundamentally at the level of argument structure and internal morpho-semantic composition, and thus combine with DPs via different routes; contrary to uniform approaches to know and believe. Whereas believe-verbs describe relations to intentional content, and require external licensing mechanisms to combine with DPs, know-verbs describe complex relations, fundamentally anchored in the attitude holder’s acquaintance with (abstract or concrete) individuals in the world, and thus make reference to individuals as part of their argument structure. The current proposal also builds on and adds to previous work about connections between factivity, DP-complementation, and question-embedding.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005943 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	submitted for peer review
keywords:	attitude reports, dp-complementation, selection, factivity, knowledge vs. belief, argument structure, question-embedding, know dp vs. know cp, believe content vs. source dp, morpho-semantic composition, acquaintance and epistemic attitudes, semantics
previous versions:	v3 [May 2021] v2 [May 2021] v1 [May 2021]
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