Utterances without commitment

Abstract

AbstractIn many Ibero-Romance varieties, an illocutionary complementizer is used to report second-hand speech (Ceong 2019) in matrix environments. In such ‘presentative’ que expressions, the speaker puts forth (Portner 2006) or presents (Faller 2002, 2006, Déchaine et al. 2017) a proposition into the shared knowledge, without designating a truth value to its content. The construction’s interpretative contribution is licensed by (i) absence of V-to-Fin raising, which enables the speaker to put forth the proposition without committing to—i.e. asserting—its truth; and (ii) the lexicalization of the phasal edge by the complementizer, yielding a maximal expansion of the clausal structure. The availability of presentative que across (Ibero-)Romance inversely correlates with the height of verb movement, such that varieties with a higher landing site cannot put forward a proposition without also asserting—through compulsory V-to-Fin movement—the truth of that set of affairs.