Factive islands and questions about propositions

Abstract

In this squib, I evaluate the contradiction analysis (Abrusán in Natural Language Semantics 19(3):257–321, 2011, in Weak island semantics, 2014) and the necessary infelicity analysis (Oshima in Washio et al. (eds.), New frontiers in artificial intelligence, 2007; Schwarz and Simonenko in Natural Language Semantics 26(3–4):253–279, 2018b) of factive islands in light of a pattern that has not been previously discussed in the literature: questions about propositions. I argue that while the necessary infelicity approach can straightforwardly explain the acceptability of this kind of question, the contradiction account undergenerates, since it wrongly predicts their ungrammaticality. I claim that this prediction follows from the assumption that the domain of quantification contains contraries. Therefore, the main contribution of this squib is the observation that such an assumption cannot play an explanatory role in accounting for factive islands.