Know whether and -ever free relative clauses

Abstract

Know whether sentences and -ever free relative clauses have not been studied together, but they have similar contextual constraints. This work offers an explanation of their similarities based on well-established pragmatic principles. These constructions are proposed to evoke equally informative alternatives with stronger presuppositions, and as a consequence of Heim's (1991) pragmatic principle of Maximize Presupposition, the use of a know whether sentence or a sentence containing an -ever free relative clause requires the presuppositions of all of its alternatives not to be satisfied. This gives rise to a variety of requirements, depending on what grammatical environment either construction appears in and how its presuppositions project. Although the modal implications of -ever free relative clauses are typically analyzed as a semantically-encoded component of their meaning, this work argues that a pragmatic explanation provides better coverage of a broad range of empirical observations.

“Know Your Coffee!” The Cultural Semantics of a Lexico-Syntactic Molecule of English

“…The English verb know and its equivalents in other languages have attracted the attention of various scholars over the years, including cognitivists (Shetreet et al, 2019), epistemologists (Stich, Mizumoto, & McCready, 2018;Mizumoto, Ganeri, & Goddard, 2020) and obviously linguists (Goddard, 2002(Goddard, , 2015Capone, 2011;Wierzbicka, 2018;Farese, 2018;Abenina-Adar, 2019). In this paper, I do not intend to discuss the epistemological question of 'propositional knowledge attribution', i.e., whether one can legitimately claim that Mary knows that Rome is the capital of Italy by attributing such knowledge to Mary.…”