Roberta Colonna Dahlman and Joost van de Weijer
Affiliation: Lund University
Category: Linguistics
Keywords: Factivity, Evidentiality, Prosody, Semantic change
Date: Tuesday 2nd of September
Time: 17:30
Location: GSSR Plenary Hall (268)
View the full session: Communicating the Facts
This study presents the results of an experiment conducted on the prosodic properties of sentences containing the factive verb know, in English and in Italian (sapere). In the last few years, the traditional analysis of know as a factive verb has been lively debated by linguists and philosophers (see, for instance, Holton 1997, 2017; Hazlett 2010; Abrusán 2011, 2021, 2022; Turri 2011; Tsohatzidis 2012; Buckwalter 2014; Wiegand 2015, 2018; Simons et al. 2017; Djärv 2019). All these scholars have highlighted the fact that know may be used non-factively in ordinary language, that is, in contexts where the that-complement expresses a false proposition, as illustrated in (1):
(1) The keys were not in the drawer but she knew that they were there, so she foolishly kept on searching. (ex. (42b) in Abrusán 2011: 514)
This scenario – the possibility for a speaker to use know in cases where the proposition expressed by the embedded clause is not true – is not exclusive for speakers of English. In Italian, it is possible to use sapere non-factively, as illustrated in (2), and the phenomenon has been discussed by several scholars (see Macagno & Capone 2016, Colonna Dahlman 2017, Lombardi Vallauri & Masia 2018, Domaneschi & Di Paola 2019, Colonna Dahlman & van de Weijer 2019):
(2) Marina sa che Carlo la tradisce, ma lui le è fedele. ‘Marina knows that Carlo is unfaithful, but actually he is faithful.’ (ex. (37’) in Lombardi Vallauri & Masia 2018: 112)
The occurrence of non-factive uses of factive predicates seems to be a phenomenon that typically arises in spoken language and may very well be marked in the utterance’s prosody. This has been suggested by the results of experiments geared toward the interpretation of factive utterances (Tonhauser 2016, Djärv & Bacovcin 2017, 2020, Mahler et al. 2020). These studies, however, focused exclusively on so-called “projective” contexts in which the implication is expected to survive in spite of entailment-cancelling operators such as negation, question and epistemic modals. Our experiment is geared toward the production of factive utterances with the aim to explore whether sentences containing know/sapere are realized with different intonational patterns depending on whether the verb is used factively or not. Previous results show that English know is accepted in non-factive contexts, however, not as uncontroversially as Italian sapere (Colonna Dahlman & van de Weijer 2022). Therefore, in the present study, we investigate whether the established difference in acceptability judgments between the two languages is reflected in the acoustic structure of the utterances. A total of 30 native speakers of Italian and 26 native speakers of English engaged in dialogues with the experimenter. Two of the English dialogues are shown below. The participants were first shown a context that the experimenter did not have access to. After reading the context, the participants saw a reply that they had to read out loud prompted by a question posed by the experimenter. Their task was to read this reply in such a way as to convey to the experimenter a message that fit the information in the context. Each dialogue occurred once in a factive context and once more in a non-factive context. Moreover, in half of the dialogues, know/sapere was used with an evidential function, referring to another source of information than the speaker, as illustrated in example dialogue 2.
Example dialogue 1 Factive context: Mary is a vegetarian. Her friend Billy is having a dinner party tonight preparing only meat. So he didn’t invite her. Non-factive context: Mary was a vegetarian but decided recently to start eating meat again. None of her friends are aware that she is eating meat again. Her friend Billy is having a dinner party tonight preparing only meat, and he didn’t invite her. Experimenter question: Why wasn’t Mary invited to the dinner party tonight? Participant reply: Because Billy knows that Mary is a vegetarian.
Example dialogue 2 Factive context: Your friend Susan is a fashion expert and she told you that short skirts are in this year. Non-factive context: Your friend Susan has never been one to follow fashion trends. The other day she told you that short skirts are in this year, but you don’t know whether you can trust what she says. Experimenter question: What skirts are in fashion this year? Participant reply: Susan knows that short skirts are in.
Recordings of the replies were annotated and analyzed using the speech editor Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2022). We measured pitch (semitones) and duration (seconds) of the subject and the verb of the main clause, two variables that are positively correlated with acoustic prominence. In the analyses (mixed effects regression models) we focused on the effects of factivity within evidential and non-evidential utterances within each language.
Figure 1 shows boxplots of the measurements. The results of the analyses showed that in both languages there were significant factivity effects on the duration of the subjects of the main clauses in the evidential utterances but not in the non-evidential utterances. The effect on the pitch of the subjects was not significant in either language. On the verbs, however, there were main effects of factivity on the duration in evidential and non-evidential utterances, but only in English and not in Italian. The effect of factivity on the pitch of the verbs was significant in English in the non-evidential utterances but not in the evidential utterances.
Therefore, ‘knows’ in non-factive contexts is prosodically marked in English, but Italian ‘sa’ is not. Following the “Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change” developed by Traugott and Dasher (2004), we suggest that the meaning of sapere in Italian has undergone a process of semantic change and has been generalized into ‘believe’ (that is, sapere is ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense). The meaning of English know, on the other hand, is still primarily factive, although involved in a similar ongoing process of change that eventually may lead to a similar generalization.