On Factive Islands: Pragmatic Anomaly vs. Pragmatic Infelicity

Certain types of wh-phrases (e.g. how, why) cannot be extracted from the complement clause of a factive predicate, nor can they occur in situ within it (the factive island effect). This paper argues that the factive island effect is a pragmatic phenomenon, which follows from two independent factors: (i) the speaker’s expectation about possible answers of wh-interrogatives, and (ii) presuppositions induced by factive predicates. The proposed account illustrates a special kind of pragmatic infelicity (which I term “pragmatic anomaly”), which can be opposed to “contingent” pragmatic infelicity such as presupposition failure, violation of Gricean maxims, etc.