Knowledge and Desire, from a German Perspective

The German modal verb wollen ( want) easily embeds reports of interrogative knowledge (know whether), but is reluctant to take propositional knowledge reports (know that) as complements. The difference is accounted for in terms of presupposition projection and a bridge principle relating desire reports and knowledge. The overall setting is a presuppositional extension of Groenendijk & Stokhof’s (1982; 1984) partition semantics, as proposed by Sæbø (2005). 1 A Puzzle The first snow has fallen. The roads are icy. Gaby has left about an hour ago. Under normal circumstances she would have arrived at her office half an hour ago, but with the weather it is to be expected she is late. She promised to ring Heinz on her arrival. She hasn’t so far and Heinz is beginning to get worried. He wants Gaby to have arrived safely and he also wants to know that she has. Heinz’s state of mind can be summed up by two German sentences: