Schedule 80. StuTS

In this talk, I will examine the aspectual classification of change-of-state doxastic predicates in Romanian, an Eastern Romance language previously understudied on the topic. As a subclass of propositional attitude reports, these verbs describe an individual’s mental state with regards to a proposition and, more specifically, they encode a transition in belief. Studies on English have identified a group of change-of-state doxastics that are also factive, presupposing the truth of their complement, and referred to them as “come-to-know” verbs (e.g. discover, find out). For instance, “Mary discovered that the Earth is round” suggests that the Earth is indeed round; negating the statement, “Mary did not discover that the Earth is round”, does not affect the truth of the embedded sentence and only highlights that the subject has not yet acquired the information. My research advances the discussion of “come-to-know” predicates and their properties by investigating Romanian. First, I identified five Romanian verbs that fit in the category by using the MegaVeridicality database of English attitude verbs as a starting point; then, I checked how their entailment projects and I tested their lexical aspect using adapted diagnostics and the intuitions of a small group of native speakers.