Factive Complements as Defective Phases

This paper presents a minimalist analysis of the semantic and syntactic behavior of factive complements. As originally noted by Kiparsky and Kiparsky ('K&K', 1970), factive predicates ('factives,' e.g. regret, hate, remember) are distinguished from non-factives (e.g. think, say, reckon) in that the former presuppose the truth of their complement clause while the latter do not. Consider the examples in (1).