Consider (4). If the speaker says (4a), they can follow it up with (4b), but not with (4c). In other words, Sajana remembering on Tuesday Badma’s breaking the cart is compatible with Badma starting the breaking on Monday, but not on Wednesday (given that we are talking about the same week).3

(4b) specifies the beginning time of the breaking event which is before the time of Sajana’s thinking in (4a), while (4c) specifies the beginning time of the breaking event which is after (4a)’s matrix time. This example suggests that the NMN in (4a) describes an event that started prior to Sajana’s mental state described by hanaxa.

I would like to argue that the temporal inference that we see in (4) is not about temporal precedence, but about pre-existence: an entity or event described by the nominal complement of hanaxa must have started existing in the world at which hanaxa is evaluated (henceforth matrix world) before the time at which hanaxa is evaluated (henceforth matrix time). This implies two things: (i) the left boundary of the entity or event described by the nominal is before the matrix time; (ii) the right boundary of the entity or event described by the nominal is not set and could in principle be after the matrix time. I will show that these are the characteristics of the temporal inference that we observe.

That the left boundary of the time interval corresponding to hanaxa’s complement is before the matrix time can be illustrated with sentences in which hanaxa combines with non-derived noun phrases that denote entities.4 I assume that a time interval corresponding to an entity is its life span, the left boundary of which corresponds to the start of its existence, while the right boundary corresponds to the end of its existence. In (5) we see hanaxa taking ‘her future child’ as its Theme argument:

Seseg’s child exists in the actual world at the utterance time, but this is not enough for (5) to be felicitous: the child needs to have existed before the matrix time, which in this case is some contextually salient time 7 years ago. This suggests that hanaxa’s Theme has to pre-exist its event argument: Theme’s left boundary must be before the matrix time.

Another piece of evidence for the pre-existence inference comes from sentences where hanaxa combines with fictional characters that are clearly taken to not be existing at the time of the attitude. Consider (6).

In (6) the object which Badma’s thoughts are about has to not exist before his thoughts. This leads to an infelicitous sentence when such a fictional individual is the internal argument of hanaxa. The desired meaning can be conveyed if a different construction, (6b), is used, where the mental attitude is expressed without a designated attitude verb.

The fact that noun phrases ‘her future child’ and ‘an eight-headed cat’ are internal arguments of hanaxa is crucial for the infelicity of (5b) and (6a). When such noun phrases combine via a postposition tuxai ‘about’, there is no pre-existence requirement. (7a) is fine in a context where Seseg is not pregnant, and (7b), although less preferred compared to (6b), is acceptable in a context where Badma imagines a non-existing animal.

This suggests that being the topic/object of thoughts is not a sufficient requirement for being subject to the pre-existence inference; being the internal argument of the verb is a necessary condition.

When hanaxa combines with nominalized expressions, showing the pre-existence requirement is more complicated, because of the question of how it interacts with the temporal/aspectual properties of nominalized clauses (see sections 3.2.1 and 4.2 for discussion). Nevertheless, I take evidence from hanaxa combining with non-derived nouns to be suggestive of the requirement that the left boundary of the time interval corresponding to the object of hanaxa has to be before the matrix time.

Now let us consider how the right boundary of hanaxa’s Theme can be placed with respect to the matrix time. There are two facts suggesting that there is no restriction placed on it. First, when hanaxa combines with entities, e.g., with proper names, (8), the sentence does not presuppose that the individual denoted by the entity stopped existing: Badma does not need to be dead in order for (8) to be true.

Provided that when the time function takes an entity, it returns its life span — the time interval corresponding to the entity’s existence, (8) suggests that the temporal component does not require the right boundary of the Theme argument to precede the time of the thinking event.

Second, the placement of the right boundary of an event described by the NMN depends on the aspectual properties of the participle/form that it is based on.5 There are nominalized forms such that the left boundary of a NMN-event is before the matrix time, but the right boundary can be after the matrix time. One such form is presented in (9), where an analytical verbal form consisting of the verb ‘be’ and a converb is nominalized.67

If the pre-existence inference required the right boundary of an event described by the nominalized expression to be before the matrix time, we would have expected interpretations like in (9) to not be possible.

Thus, I conclude that in sentences where hanaxa combines with a nominal phrase (noun or nominalized clause), there is a pre-existence inference, which places a requirement on the left boundary, but not the right boundary of hanaxa’s object:

I propose that the factivity inference that we saw in (2b) and (3) is a consequence of (10): if the left boundary of an entity/event in the matrix world that one is thinking about is before the thinking, that entity/event has to exist at the time of thinking.

Is this pre-existence presupposition responsible for turning ‘thinking’ into ‘remembering’? I would like to argue that hanaxa in sentences with nominal arguments does not in fact get the meaning that verbs meaning ‘remember’ in other languages have, but that the pre-existence presupposition is responsible for hanaxa being translated as ‘remember’. Buryat does not seem to have a designated verb whose meaning would describe memories of attitude holders, and hanaxa with nominal arguments does not have to describe memories either, as can be seen from examples like (11). In (11) hanaxa takes a nominalized clause as its complement, and is modified by an adverb türü:∫ɘnxijɘ: ‘for the first time’.8

If hanaxa with a direct object described memories, then modification by türü:∫ɘnxijɘ: ‘for the first time’ should have been impossible: the attitude holder needs to have previous thoughts about an entity/event in order to remember them. The fact that such modification is possible suggests that hanaxa’s meaning does not directly reference memories or previous mental states, and its pre-existence presupposition is about existence in the world at which hanaxa is evaluated. This conclusion is supported by the fact that (11) is infelicitous in the context B, where the discourse participants are ignorant about Badma’s working skills in the actual world.

While hanaxa’s meaning does not appeal to memories, its presupposition might be similar enough to presuppositions of verbs like remember to warrant the ‘remember’ translation in sentences with nominal complements. While hanaxa presupposes that its internal argument existed in the actual world before the matrix time, it could be that verbs like remember presuppose that their internal arguments existed in both the memory/mental state of the attitude holder and in the actual world before the matrix time. If that is so, then remembering an individual entails hanaxa-ing that individual. Thus, in the absence of a more specific verb like remember, hanaxa + NP can be used for describing remembering situations in a language like Buryat. I leave further comparison between hanaxa with nominal complements and verbs like remember for further research.

An anonymous reviewer raises an alternative hypothesis that hanaxa just requires that its object has been previously mentioned. I don’t think hanaxa has such requirement. In (12) Badma’s breaking a cart has not been previously mentioned in the discourse. Nevertheless, Dugar’s utterance, which has the nominalized expression Badma’s breaking the cart as the complement of hanaxa, is felicitous in this context.

In (13) Earth being flat is previously mentioned in the discourse. However, this is not sufficient for the nominalized clause Earth’s being flat to be used felicitously as the object of hanaxa.

Thus, being previously mentioned is neither necessary nor sufficient condition for using a nominal as hanaxa’s object.

The pre-existence inference behaves like a presupposition: it introduces backgrounded information which is common knowledge to the participants of the conversation, and it projects in questions and survives under negation, as illustrated in (14) and (15), respectively. This suggests that the inference at hand is a presupposition.

The projection of the pre-existence presupposition is summarized in (16).

The inference that projects in (14)–(15) is that there is an event of Badma breaking the cart in the actual world that started before the matrix time. If this inference is part of the common ground, then the speaker cannot be ignorant about it (14) or directly contradict it (15). The analysis of how the pre-existence presupposition is encoded should ensure that the empirical generalization in (16) is derived.

Factivity is one of the components of the presupposition under consideration. What part of the sentence contributes this inference? There are several hypotheses about the origin of factive presuppositions (see discussion in Özyıldız 2016); one prominent hypothesis is that factive presuppositions are contributed by the complement of the verb (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970; Kallulli 2010; De Cuba 2007; De Cuba & Urogdi 2010; Haegeman 2014; Kratzer 2006; Kastner 2015; Hanink & Bochnak 2017a). This hypothesis is attractive in light of cross-linguistic data, which suggests that there are correlations found between the syntactic category of the complement of attitude verbs and their factivity (Moulton 2009; Abrusán 2011; Özyıldız 2017). I will argue that this hypothesis cannot be maintained for Buryat.

First, the factive inference does not always arise when otherwise non-factive verbs combine with nominalized expressions. For example, when verbs ɘtigɘxɘ ‘believe’ and naidaxa ‘hope’ take NMNs as their complements, no factive inference arises, hence the felicity of (17)–(18).10

This suggests that the nominal status of the argument does not suffice for the factive inference to come about. Note that the nominalized expressions in (17)–(18) are the same as the ones we have seen with hanaxa, except that they bear a different case. While hanaxa ‘think’ assigns accusative case to nominalized clauses, (2a), the verbs ɘtigɘxɘ ‘believe’ and naidaxa ‘hope’ assign a lexical case — dative. The argument structure of the attitude verb, reflected in case assignment, seems to play a role in whether the factive inference is present. Similiar observations have been made by Djärv (2019), who shows that verbs like believe and know have different argument structures (with different options for case assignment in German): believe, but not know, selects for individuals that describe source or vessel of the propositional content; know on the other hand combines with individuals without any relation to the propositional content. We can hypothesize that a distinction along similar lines is present in Barguzin Buryat, although a more thorough investigation of this issue is necessary.

Second, the nominalized expression under consideration can have indefinite uses, so the factive inference cannot be due to the definiteness of the complement (see Kastner 2015; Hanink & Bochnak 2017a for proposals of how definiteness can lead to factivity). Buryat does not have articles, but it can be still shown that the NMN can have indefinite uses.11 Consider (19).

The fact that three women could have each remembered different singing of a song about Buryatia by Sajana suggests that the NMN does not have to be definite: definite descriptions have uniqueness presuppositions, and having a uniqueness presupposition would have made (19) infelicitous in the context A. Thus, given that NMNs can denote indefinite descriptions and that the presence of the factive inference does not seem to depend on the context, I conclude that an account of the factivity alternation has to be able to derive the factive inference even for indefinite uses of NMNs.

To sum up, the factive component cannot be attributed to the meaning of the nominalized clause: the fact that it is nominalized is not sufficient for the factive inference (NMN’s θ-role seems to play a role), definiteness is not necessary for the factive inference (NMNs can have indefinite readings). Therefore, while in (1a)–(2a) we saw that the type of the complement (CP versus NP) correlates with the presence of the presupposition, I conclude that the meaning of the nominalized expression itself does not supply the presupposition. I propose that the correlation is a result of CPs and NPs combining with attitude verbs in different ways.

I have argued above that participle-based nominalized clauses like (2a) do not specify Content of events that are in their characteristic set. Barguzin Buryat also has a different kind of nominalized expressions: nominalized CPs (63).38

The NMN in (63) involves a finite clause under the complementizer g-ɘ:∫ɘ, which consists of the root gɘ ‘say’ and participial suffix -A:∫A. Unlike gɘžɘ-CPs, nominalized CPs like (63) have nominal morphology (case, optional possessive markers) and the syntactic distribution of NPs. Given that under my proposal complementizers introduce Content relations, our expectation is that the nominalized CP in (63) is a predicate of entities like claim/rumor/thought with Content ‘Badma read a book yesterday’:

Thus I make a prediction that when a NMN like (63) is an object of hanaxa, there should be no factive inference that an event of the kind described by the clause under g-ɘ:∫ɘ (Badma’s reading a book yesterday) exists in the actual world. This is so because an event of the embedded proposition is not itself an object of hanaxa. This prediction is borne out:

The absence of a factive inference here is not surprising under my proposal. I assume that (64), just like other noun phrases, combines as the second argument of θ_Th. The pre-existence presupposition introduced by θ_Th is still present in (65), but since θ_Th’s argument is a predicate of individuals with Content ‘The cat ate the fish’, it presupposes that an individual with this propositional Content pre-exists the matrix time rather than that an event of the cat eating fish pre-exists the matrix time.

This presupposition about the existence of an argument with Content is illustrated in (66): in a context where Dugar was the first person to think that the cat ate the fish, (66) is infelicitous.

To sum up, the pre-existence presupposition is observed with all nominalized clauses, which combine with hanaxa via the θ_Th projection. The pre-existence presupposition will lead to a factive inference only if the nominalized expression denotes a predicate of events of the kind described by the embedded predicate, but not if it denotes a predicate of individuals whose Content is the embedded proposition.

Another prediction that the current proposal makes is that combining hanaxa with a nominalized clause based on a participle that sets the left boundary of the NMN-event after the matrix time should result in presupposition failure. This is so because the presupposition introduced by θ_Th in (55), repeated in (67), explicitly states that the left boundary of the NMN-event should precede the matrix time.

Testing this prediction turns out to be quite complicated. The main issue is that we need to find a morpheme that indeed sets the left boundary of an eventuality after the matrix time, and it is not obvious that a morpheme with exactly such meaning exists in Barguzin Buryat. The best candidate is the morpheme -xA (POT), which can describe future eventualities when it occurs in finite forms:

In addition to future reference, xa seems to express modal meanings, as can be seen in the following sentence from (Skribnik & Darzhaeva 2016):

When -xA (POT) occurs in embedded contexts, its interpretation is often not identical to its finite uses, and seems to depend on a number of factors, among which are the meaning of the matrix verb, the type of the embedded clause, aspectual class of the embedded eventuality. A thorough investigation of -xA (POT) in embedded contexts would be necessary to properly understand the combination of xA-NMNs with hanaxa, which is beyond the scope of this paper. Here I only present some initial observations related to this issue.

Consider the sentence in (70), in which hanaxa combines with a nominalized clause based on the -xA participle.

The interpretation corresponding to context A seems to be the most prominent one, which is surprising given how xA-forms are interpreted in finite sentences, (68)–(69). One could hypothesize that the pre-existence presupposition introduced by hanaxa somehow is able to override the semantic contribution of xA, but what kind of mechanism would be responsible for that is unclear.39

The second interpretation requires more support from the context, but seems to be generally available. When (70) is uttered in context B, the eventuality of buying three bottles of milk is in the future with respect to the matrix time, and what is being remembered, it seems, is the plan to buy three bottles of milk. As two anonymous reviewers point out, this pattern is similar to English remember, which when taking a future-oriented complement, also requires that there is a plan in place already at the time of the remembering.40

Does the existence of such an interpretation for the xA-NMN with hanaxa pose a problem for my proposal about the pre-existence presupposition? It seems impossible to answer this question without an understanding of how (and why) the “planned eventuality” reading comes about. Given that the idea that a plan for an event can constitute an early stage of the event has been entertained the literature (Dowty 1979; Cipria & Roberts 2000), it could be that the shift observed in the meaning of the nominalized clause is happening in order to satisfy hanaxa’s pre-existence presupposition.

While the question of why a plan could count as an early stage of an event is beyond the scope of this paper (see Copley 2008; 2014 for discussion of this issue in light of futurates), I would like to provide some evidence that it is indeed the plan, and not the event itself, that xA-NMNs denote when they combine with hanaxa. Consider (72).

In this example the speaker doesn’t think that Badma will buy meat at a future time, but the use of a xA-NMN with hanaxa is still acceptable, and what the speaker recalls is Badma’s plan to buy meat.

A similiar point is illustrated in (73), where the speaker recalls Dugar’s obligation, which they know he will not fulfill.

I would like to tentatively suggest that in cases like (72) and (73) the pre-existence presupposition applies to the modal statement that xA introduces: e.g., in (73) it is the necessity for Dugar to return next week which pre-exists the matrix time. Further research is necessary to test this hypothesis.

One implication of my proposal is that some factivity inferences that we observe in sentences with attitude verbs are reducible to restrictions that predicates place on their internal arguments. This facilitates a view that unifies attitude verbs and predicates of events without propositional Content: both can presuppose that there is an individual described by their internal argument that pre-exists the event described by them. When the internal argument is a predicate of events, we get a factive inference.

Support for this view comes from languages which use non-attitude verbs in order to describe attitudes: we see that the restrictions these verbs place on their arguments carry over into their attitudinal uses. I will briefly discuss three such cases from different languages: Balkar (Turkic), Russian and Bangla (from Banerjee et al. 2019).41

Here is an example of this from Balkar.42 The verb ‘drop’ (‘cause to fall’) requires that its direct object pre-exists the dropping (74). When what is being dropped is an event (denoted by the nominalized clause) and the location of the dropping is one’s memory, we arrive at an attitude report meaning ‘remember’ (75). Naturally, this attitude report has a factive inference: there has to exist an event of Fatima winning the contest.

Thus, it seems that the pre-existence requirement that we see in (74) with respect to the internal argument of ‘drop’ is retained when the internal argument is an event-denoting nominalized expression and the resulting meaning is that of an attitude report.43

Here is another example. Russian verb vyletet’ ‘fly out’, which seems to presuppose that an individual flying out was in the specified location prior to flying, can occur with a PP ‘out of head’ and a CP clause, and a factive attitude report meaning ‘forget’ is created in such cases (76).44

Banerjee et al. (2019) and Banerjee & Karmakar (2020) discuss attitude reports in Bangla that are built from the preverb mone ‘in mind’ and different light verbs. They observe that the properties of the light verb play a crucial role in whether the attitude report has a factive inference. For example, the object of the verb fall, as opposed to the object of happen, has to exist before the matrix time. When these verbs are used for creating attitude reports, the former exhibits factive inferences, while the latter does not.

Banerjee et al. (2019) conclude that “it is the semantics of ‘mind-predicates’ which is crucial to impose (non)presuppositionality…”.45 I agree with this conclusion: the argument structure of embedding verbs, in particular the presuppositions associated with their internal arguments, is what stands behind (at least some, but potentially all) factive inferences.46

While it is beyond the scope of this paper to conclude whether examples like (75), (76), and (77) all indeed involve the same alloseme of θ_Th which introduces a pre-existence presupposition, these examples suggest that natural languages widely make use of non-attitude verbs for constructing attitudinal meanings, and the inferences we get from sentences with clausal complements seem to parallel those that are present in sentences with nominal ones. I take this as tentative evidence that argument-introducing heads could be responsible for creating factive inferences cross-linguistically.