Extending the TMT

Shee&H propose (50):

(50) The Extended TMT: Object-reference in clauses is derived by V-to-C movement.

If so, what really matters for object-reference is again not any lexical labels or features such as‘N’ or ‘D’, but simply the naked topology of the phase, in which there is a basic bi-partite division into a predicative core (the interior) and a referential periphery (the edge), irrespective of lexical category specifications:

(51) [referentialedge [predicativeinterior]]

The ‘interior’ provides for the descriptive content of a lexical concept that, in the course of the grammatical structure-building process, is converted into an expression that is made referential in one of the grammatically available ways. In (52), this basic template is instantiated in two grammatically equivalent ways:

(52) a. [referentialthe [predicativekings of France]]

b. [referentialthat [predicativethere are kings of France]]

Just as the NP provides a descriptive condition for the identity of the referent mapped from‘the’ at the edge of (52a), TP provides such a description for the referent mapped from‘that’ at the edge of (52b). This makes a direct prediction: if ‘that’ in the edge of the clause regulates the reference of clauses, there should again be two extremes: a weakest case, in which the edge is not projected at all; a stronger case in which it is projected, but remains empty; and a yet stronger case, in which it must befilled— either, we expect, through a clausal equivalent of the Italian‘expletive’ definite article, or through T-to-C movement. Shee&H present a broad range of data in support of this prediction. For clauses, the strongest form of reference that is available is reference to a truth value: there is nothing more fundamental or extensional than truth. Truer than true, nothing is, and the truth of a sentence, if it obtains, holds no matter what: in particular, all referential terms in it can be replaced by co-extensional ones salva veritate. Since nothing is ever asserted to be false, moreover,5this truth- value is always truth. Reference to the truth in this sense is achieved only at the root, i.e. in matrix clauses. In that case, we see that the Complementizer is obligatorily absent in a language like English (53), exactly as the determiner in the case of object (as well as kind) reference (54):

(53) (*That) John left. (54) (*The) John

As noted in Shee&H (2011: 27), this absence cannot be due to a general ban on Complementizers in matrix assertions, since V2 languages provide clear evidence that matrix clauses can be CPs. Rather, (53) would be explained on more principled grounds if (53) patterned with (54) in that, in English, the head in the interior of the

5 _{‘It is false that John left’ asserts, of course, that it is true that it is false that John left, i.e. that John didn’t}

phase (V/T) must move to the edge (C) covertly in the case of truth-reference, a movement that any overt Complementizer would block. In line with this hypothesis, we observe that if a non-expletive Complementizer is overt in Catalan as in (55), or in French, as in (56), readings are derived in which no truth value is asserted (both examples have subjunctive morphology usually found in embedded clauses):6

(55) Que sempre hagi de fer el dinar jo Catalan

That always have.3SG.SUBJ of do.INF lunch I.NOM

‘That I have to always do lunch!’

(56) Que Jean soit malade de la tuberculose en 2003! French

That Jean be.SUBJ ill of the tuberculosis in 2003

‘For Jean to be sick with tuberculosis in 2003!’ [Schlenker (2005: 10)] We expect these clauses not to be truth denoting, unless an expletive Complementizer is lexically available that forms the clausal equivalent of the‘expletive’ definite article in Italian nominals, as in Gascon (57):

(57) *(Que) soi Gascon Gascon

that be.1S Gascon

‘I am Gascon’ [Campos (1992)]

‘Que’ in this language appears to be precisely restricted to finite matrix clauses in which a truth is asserted. V-initial and V2 languages provide other evidence, to which we return shortly, that V-to-C movement indeed can take place overtly as well in truth-denoting clauses, paralleling the Italian nominal case. This derives, via the phasal model, an old Fregean intuition: that (assertoric) sentences are proper names, just derived ones. They, too, are object-denoting, with truth as the traditional name for the‘object’ denoted.

The weakest form of reference available for a finite clause is where the clause is merely a proposition: a possible truth. That is, the speaker takes no attitude towards the truth-value of the clause. We predict that in this case, the edge can be empty, as it indeed can be in English:

(58) I believe/say/suppose (that) John left.

The further prediction is that where clauses lack a CP layer altogether, such as clauses occurring as complements of raising, exceptional case-marking (ECM), and restruc- turing verbs, they fail to gain independent referential status. No properly bi-phasal structure is generated, allowing Case to be assigned from beyond the clause boundary in ECM (see further Chapter6).

6 _{For a range of other examples from other non-V2 languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Romanian,}

Finally, just as definite descriptions have always oscillated in philosophers’ intu- itions in regards to whether they are referential or quantificational, we obtain an intermediate case in the clausal instance too. Clauses differ from nominals in that the latter are normally embedded as arguments. They can be vocatives, of course, but nonetheless, a nominal such as‘the man’ cannot normally stand on its own, as a self- standing utterance. Clauses, however, can be embedded as arguments as much as they can be unembedded. A clause that has been evaluated for truth by the speaker and occurs as an argument is factive (fact-referring). We predict from the above that, in this case, the edge must befilled. Vindicating this prediction is complicated by a number of factors, and in particular the heterogeneity in the class of factive verbs. As Shee&H argue, however, on the basis of a typology of such clauses, the purest case of factive verbs is that of the so-called‘emotive factives’. In this case, the complementi- zer is obligatory, as predicted, exactly as the determiner is obligatory in the case of definite but not indefinite DPs:

(59) I regret/resent/ignore/neglect *(that) John left

Factives, thus, are the clausal analogue of definite descriptions: these, as illustrated above, can be referential; but they necessarily have a predicative core (NP-comple- ment), which enters the act of reference. In a similar way, factive clauses can be viewed as referential expressions, but they nonetheless never rigidly refer to truth values, as only matrix clauses do: the speaker asserting (59) does not assert that John left.7 Rather, the embedded clause is still a grammatical predicate, like all other arguments are, when they are embedded in higher phases. Thus, in kill Bill, Bill is a predicate (the Theme) of an object, an event, which is derived at the edge of v. Similarly, in (59), that John left is a description of a content identifying a particular mental event that is referenced by the matrix verb.

Expectedly, factive clauses also constitute an intermediate case with regards to inten- sionality effects: if Lois Lane resents that Superman left, she need not resent that Clark Kent left, even if these two are, on some intuitions, the same fact. But if Superman left, then Clark Kent left, showing that reference is rigid and maximally extensional in the matrix case. Factive clauses are as truth-denoting as things can get, in human language, in an argument position, given the constraint argued for in Chapter3 that only whole sentences can denote truth-values. Factive clauses share other properties in common with definite DPs, such as a presupposition of existence. This presupposition cannot be cancelled:

(60) John cares/is glad that the world is flat, *but it isn’t.

(61) Jeanne d’Arc talked to the king of France, *but he didn’t exist.

7 _{This is to share with Melvold (1991) and Haegeman and Ürögdi (2010) the intuition that referentiality,}

not factivity per se, is the crucial explanatory notion underlying the phenomena traditionally discussed under the heading of‘factivity’.

This proposal must crucially not be confused with an older one, according to which factive CPs are in fact nominals. According to this proposal, C is a nominal head in these instances, and the clauses in question contain a silent‘fact’-nominal (Kiparsky and Kiparsky, 1970). This suggestion is natural where factive clauses are (rightly) diagnosed as referential, but referentiality is (wrongly) diagnosed as a consequence of lexical category (‘nominal’), which we have argued in Chapter 2 is a confusion of lexical and grammatical semantics. As we have seen, there is nothing necessarily referential about nominals. Moreover, what speaks against the older proposal is that the distribution of factive clauses is not the same as that of definite DPs, as also discussed in Picallo (2002), Ambridge and Goldberg (2008), Haegeman and Ürögdi (2010), and Betti (2011). Consider, for example, (62) and (63):

(62) I am surprised (*at)/aware (*of ) that you feel that way. (63) I am surprised *(at)/aware *(of ) that.

Moreover, factive clauses behave differently regarding extraction: they are only weak islands, whereas complex NPs are strong islands. We return to extraction below.

Let us summarize, then, the ‘Extended TMT’ as proposed in Shee&H, which associates a threefold formal ontology with the clause:

(64) The Extended Topological Mapping Theory: Object-reference iff C is substi- tuted by V/T.

This entails that, in the absence of such movement—or a relevant PF-visible (Phonetic Form-visible) CHAIN—clausal reference will be to a mere proposition: an object that can be possibly true and possible false, but is not evaluated yet. Where there is movement to the edge (or CHAIN-formation), this, by contrast, yields reference to a truth (a derived proper name), or fact (subordinate case). Again, the hypothesis is that this movement can happen overtly or covertly depending on arbitrary externalization factors, as in the nominal case: in the clausal case, the movement is covert in English but overt in V2 languages, yielding in both cases a rigid interpretation in which the descriptive condition expressed by TP does notfix the identity of the referent (even if it helps to determine or identify it).

This proposal meshes well with the well-established fact that in V2 languages such as German, Dutch, Icelandic, Yiddish, Swedish, Norwegian, Old French, and Kash- miri the V/T-to-C chain is required to be established overtly in matrix truth-denoting clauses (cf. Den Besten,1981; Vikner, 1995; Diesing, 1990 on Yiddish; Bhatt and Yoon, 1999, on Kashmiri; and Holmberg, 2010, for an overview). The fact that this involves movement of V/T into the C-domain is suggested by the position of adverbials/ negation (65b), and the fact that the presence of another XP in preverbal position licenses subject-verb inversion (65c):

(65) a. laRkan por akhbaar Kashmiri

boy.ERG read.PAST newspaper

b. az por laRkan akhbaar

today read.PAST boy.ERG newspaper

c. akhbaar por laRkan az

newspaper read.PAST boy.ERG today [Bhatt and Yoon (1999: 48)]

While a number of influential approaches to V2 (Weerman, 1988; Truckenbrodt, 2006; Julien, 2010), have already taken this movement to be semantically motivated, Shee&H go beyond previous accounts of V2 by providing not only a plausible semantic correlate for the head-movement involved, but also by assimilating it to head-movement in the nominal domain, with parallel semantic implications: con- stant reference irrespective of descriptive conditions.

As noted earlier, the analysis of truth-evaluated clauses in subordinated positions—intermediate between truth-reference in the matrix case and propos- ition-reference in the subordinate case—faces a number of empirical problems due to the heterogeneity of the domain of factive clauses. Common to all of these types of clauses, however, is that no truth is literally asserted in these subordinate positions: the proposition encoded in the subordinate clause is not asserted as true by the speaker, though it may be asserted by the matrix subject and is presupposed as true by the speaker; but equally, that no mere proposition is denoted either, in the sense of something that can still be either true or false, i.e. has not been evaluated yet by the speaker. But the class of factives is usefully split into a narrower one compromising the so-called‘emotive factives’ (e.g. regret, resent, mind, care) (Melvold, 1991), which exemplify the phenomenon in the purest terms, and a broader class of‘semi-factives’, which can lose their factivity in some contexts (Karttunen,1971), and include the sometimes so-called‘cognitive semi-factives’ (e.g. know, discover, find out, forget) and the ‘communication semi-factives’ (e.g. disclose, divulge, confess, reveal). As Shee&H show, careful attention to syntactic differences in the behaviour of the complements of true factives, semi-factives, and non-factives shows that true factivity is a distinct syntactic type. The emotive factive verbs are distinctive precisely in selecting a single type of complement, the‘definite CP’ representing fact-reference.

An interesting phenomenon that helps to tease factive and semi-factive subordin- ate clauses apart is‘slifting’, in the sense of Ross (1973). Consider (66) vs (67):8 (66) the class is cancelled, he said/affirmed/revealed/I assume/believe/discovered/

found out.

(67) *The class is cancelled, he regrets/resents/cares.

While subordinated (cf. Grimshaw,2010), ‘slifted’ clauses form a kind of intermediate case, carrying some assertoric force indexed to the speaker, which is why the speaker cannot felicitously cancel the assertion involved:

(68) The class is cancelled, he said/affirmed/revealed, #but it’s not.

In other words, slifted clauses are (at least partially) asserted (hence truth-denoting) clauses, and it is revealing that the most paradigmatic factive verbs (i.e. the‘emotive’ ones) are impossible in this case (cf. (67)). This confirms a crucial commitment of the above mapping hypothesis for clauses: factive clauses are fact denoting, not truth- denoting; their truth is presupposed or referred to, but not asserted. At the same time, slifting allows us to tease factives and semi-factives apart, since the latter are possible in this instance (cf. (66)). The complementizer must be dropped in instances of slifting, as it often can be with semi-factives, unlike factives:

(69) He discovered/knew/realized the man had left. (70) ?*He resented/cared the man had left.

Again, this is predicted by the present approach, since the Complementizer should be obligatory only in the true factive case. If, by contrast, in the case of an assertion of truth, V moves to C, this movement would in turn explain why, in the instance of slifting, an empty C-position turns out not to be subject to Empty Category Principle (ECP) effects, which, in traditional terms, would ban the occurrence of phases with an empty edge from occurring in ‘ungoverned’ positions. As we have seen, English bare common nouns, unlike Italian ones, can circumvent this problem, as (71) illustrates:

(71) Apples are good for you.

This possibility follows if covert N-to-D movement takes place in these instances, voiding the ECP effect and yielding the rigid-referential reading that, in Italian, requires the expletive determiner to be overtly present. Why, then, can a slifted clause occur in preverbal position, as in (66), when preverbal CP-subjects usually require an overt Complementizer, which however is banned in (66)? Again, this would naturally follow if, due to the assertive nature of the clauses in question, V-to-C has taken place, voiding the ECP effect in this instance as well, and yielding truth-denoting readings.

Slifting, in being restricted to asserted clauses, further illustrates that if a clause becomes truth-referring (rather than fact-referring), it cannot be extracted from, illustrating a more widely attested difficulty for phases with stronger forms of referentiality to be‘penetrable’ from the outside:

Embedded assertive clauses are widely agreed to be strong islands for extraction (Holmberg, 2010).9 By contrast, fact-referring embedded clauses are generally assumed to only be weak islands, allowing object extraction (to a degree) but not adjunct extraction, as illustrated in (73–4):

(73) ?What car do you mind that Fred bought? (74) *When do you mind that he arrived?

Proposition-referring clauses (indefinites), in turn, the most weakly referential case, are most generous in what extractions they allow:

(75) When do you believe that he arrived?

These facts are natural under the phasal model. As has long been recognized, referentiality is a crucial factor constraining extraction. In nominals, specific definites are hardest to extract from. If referentiality is computed in the phase—and there is nowhere else it could be computed—and greater referentiality correlates with a more expanded or edge-heavy phase, then it is natural to expect that the heavier the edge and the more expanded the phase, the harder sub-extraction would be. Hence, in the clausal case, we expect that assertoric or truth-referring clauses are hardest to extract from, and proposition-referring indefinites should be easiest to extract from.10

A second way of teasing semi-factives and factives apart is via embedded root phenomena, which, in the terms of Bentzen et al. (2007: 14), are governed by the ‘Assertion Hypothesis’: ‘the more asserted (the less presupposed) the complement is, the more compatible it is with V2 (and other root phenomena)’. Consider in this light embedded V2 in (76):

(76) a. Han sa/innså at I universitetstida hadde han Norwegian

he said/realized that in university-time.the had he

vært veldig ambisiøs. been very ambitious

‘He said/discovered that, in his university days, he had been very ambitious.’

9 _{But not in German, according to Vikner (1995), which is a mystery.}

10 _{Nonetheless, the parallel is not perfect, as indefinite DPs are still well known to be weak islands,}

rather than non-islands (Chomsky,1977), as Shee&H (p. 45) note. We still have no better explanation than that, although referentiality is a purely grammatical category and is established topologically, it will be harder to establish object-referentiality, the more grammatical complexity is built. Clauses are intrinsically more complex than nominals, and it might be that, cognitively, computing an objectual correlate from a proposition—a truth value or fact—is intrinsically more complex than computing one from a property, allowing sub-extraction even where it ceases to be possible in nominals.

b. *Han angret på/benektet at i universitetstida

he regretted on/denied that in university-time.the

hadde han vært veldig ambisiøs.

had he been very ambitious. [Bentzen (2010: 169)]

Again these data follow if verb-movement to the edge yields assertive (truth refer- ring) clauses, whereas the factive complement clause of ‘regret’ in (76b) is fact referential and hence excludes embedded V2, which rather correlates with assertivity. The semi-factive‘realize’ is compatible with V2, but not the true factive ‘regret’. The same is found in regards to gerundive complements. Emotive factive predicates like non-assertive predicates take these (77), whereas assertive predicates including semi- factives do not (78):

(77) I resent/regret/avoid/deny [PRO being wrong].

(78) *I assume/disclose/know/suppose/say [PRO being right].

This simplifies the data considerably (see Shee&H, pp. 36–7), yet the crucial point remains that gerundive complements are never assertive: to assert a truth, a gerund- ive complement, which can never form a matrix clause, is insufficient, whereas it is quite sufficient to refer to a fact (such as ‘me being wrong’). Thus, in (77–8), we find factives and semi-factives parting company accordingly.

A third observation is that true factives cannot form the‘Main Point of Utterance’ (MPU), in the sense of Simons (2007), whereas the complements of semi-factive and non-factive verbs can. In (79), corner brackets indicate possible answers to the question posed:

(79) Q. What’s up with Mary?

A1. I think/guess/know [she’s not feeling well]. A2. #[I care/mind that she’s not feeling well]. A3. It’s possible/likely [she’s not feeling well].

Why can the complements of true factives not form the MPU? This follows if, for something to be the MPU, it has to be asserted. If ‘asserted’ means truth-referring, and true factives are fact-referring, it follows that true factive complements cannot form the MPU.

Slifting, embedded V2, sub-extraction, gerundive complements, and MPU all