Factivity and its floating:Evidence from three types of Mandarin verbs
This paper defines"factivity"in terms of truth presupposition and discusses the relationship between factivity and truth,reality,future tense,modality,and subjunctive mood based on the clarification of the concept of factivity.Verbs can be classified as factive and non-factive according to whether they presuppose their complement propositions to be true or false;one that presupposes the complement proposition to be true is a factive verb,while one that presupposes it to be false is anti-factive.However,there are exceptions,which are called"floating"in this paper,among all three types of verbs:factive,non-factive,and anti-factive.Floating relates to the syntactic complexity of the verb's complement.This study analyses three Mandarin verbs,wangji'forget',huaiyi'doubt/suspect',and jiazhuang'pretend',and finds that when the verb is factive/anti-factive(i.e.having a truth presupposition),the syntactic structure of its complement is complex;when it is non-factive(i.e.having no truth presupposition),the syntactic structure of its complement is simple.This observation is also supported by related phenomena in English.
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