Factivity Alternation of Attitude ‘know’ in Korean, Mongolian, Uyghur, Manchu, Azeri, etc. and Content Clausal Nominals

It was discovered in the literature (Lee 1978, 1999; Kiefer 1978, Őzyildiz 2017, Lee 2017) that the epistemic attitude report ‘know’ in Korean, Turkish, and Hungarian reveal factivity alternation and this rare phenomenon has been recently investigated also in such Altaic languages as Mongolian, Uyghur, Manchurian, and Azerbaijan, as first reported here. The attitude report ‘know’ in most languages so far known typically selects for a factive complement (Kiparsky and Kiparsky 1970, Hintikka 1975 a.o.). One generalization made is that nominalized complements tend to convey a factive reading, while non-nominal ones tend not to (Kastner 2015, Moulton 2015 a.o.). This work demonstrates that for a clause selected by a cognitive epistemic attitude verb to have a factive reading, it bears a nominal (D) feature with a structural case, whereas a clause for a non-factive reading, it does not, in alternation languages and possibly beyond. This work shows that a nominalized clause with the internal type ‘pro-fact’ noun -(u)n kes in Korean (and in Japanese as well with koto), witness-based, is factively presupposed by itself and contradicted if predicated by negated veracious adjectives in a veridicality test. It is embedded also by a doxastic verb such as mit- ‘believe.’ The non-factive alternants of ‘know’ in all the languages logically belong to the doxastic category of ‘believe’, though with implication of evidential justification in distinction with the real ‘believe,’ undergoing neg-raising, revealing their anti-rogativity. Thus, more weight is given to complements typing than to attitude reports typing.