Factivity in South Slavic Languages. Complement and Relative clauses

The paper focuses on a special class of factive complement clauses and relative clauses in Bulgarian and Croatian, embedded under the item deto in the former and što in the latter language. These clauses differ from others in that they denote specific and presuppositional readings grounded in discourse. We account for these distinctive properties by claiming that both deto/ što complements and deto/ što relatives are embedded under a Chead containing a [+anaphoric] feature which agrees with a higher definite nominal head. The broader implication of our analysis is that factivity/ presuppositionhood is encoded in syntax and hence should not be seen as a purely semantic or pragmatic phenomenon.*