Factive Complements are not always Unique Entities: A Case Study with Bangla 'remember'
Arka Banerjee
January 2024 

There are many approaches regarding the emergence of factivity in literature. Some of them who are proponents of the view that factive inferences are exported from complements, attribute it to the definiteness feature of the complements (Kastner 2015, Hanink & Bochnak 2017). This definiteness feature can be realized covertly via a semantically-sensitive definite determiner Δ (Kastner 2015), or via an overt marker (e.g., 'ge' in Washo) (Hanink & Bochnak 2017). Although Bochnak & Hanink (2022) later revised their claim by calling this ge a marker of familiarity, not that of definiteness, they did not provide any evidence where the D in factive nominalized complements is not definite. This paper provides evidence from Bangla (/Bengali; an Indo-Aryan language) where an attitude verb 'mone pora' (=remember) can embed nominalized complements that can be interpreted indefinitely but still remains factive. In this paper, we provide a formal compositional analysis that can account for this.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007835 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	In the Proceedings of 29th Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation (WoLLIC 2023)
keywords:	attitude verbs, definiteness, factive complements, compositionality, bangla, semantics
previous versions:	v1 [September 2023]
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