The syntactic distribution of factive complements

This paper analyzes Kiparsky & Kiparsky’s (1970) observation that there exists a deep correlation between the semantics and the syntax of factive complements in the light of a wide range of (old and new) phenomena : the incompatibility of ECM and that-less complements with factive predicates, weak island effects, the incompatibility of pure propositional complements with verbs that contain aspectual prefixes (RE-, DIS-), restricted sequences of tenses in propositional contexts. I then propose a structural difference between propositional and factive complements with respect to the syntactic position they occupy that accounts for the syntactic phenomena discussed here, while providing a solid basis to capture the semantic difference with regard to the presupposition associated with each complement type : factive complements are argued to appear outside the VP at LF, while propositional complements must occupy their base-generated position within VP.