Williams 2026: The Presuppositions of forget #
Empirical data and classification from [Wil26], who argues that forget is canonically factive, independent of complement type, but the content of the factive presupposition varies by frame:
- Cognition reading (finite CP): non-modal — directly presupposes complement truth
- PRO-ing gerund: non-modal — patterns with finite CP, refuting an MCA-only account
- Psych-action reading (plain infinitive): modal — presupposes a modalized proposition (an obligation/plan held before the forgetting)
The cross-linguistic generalization is the SMINC (Selectivity of Modal Insertion in Non-finite Contexts): a covert modal heads the complement of forget iff the embedded lexical verb is a plain infinitive, and is banned elsewhere. Williams' Table 1 (§3.1.3) attests this pattern across English, Spanish, Italian, German, and Hungarian; this file records the English data points.
Scope #
Williams' opening contrast (his (1)/(2)) is that forgot to V both fails
to presuppose the lower event AND is implicatively-negative
(forgot to V → ¬V; [Kar71], Karttunen 1971a, Horn 1972,
Jackendoff 1985). Williams (fn 1) brackets the implicative-negative entailment
to focus on presupposition; he does not refute it. The
implicativeNegative field below records it for cross-paper consistency
with the Karttunen tradition (formalized in
Studies/Karttunen1971.lean and
Semantics/Causation/Implicative.lean).
A second presupposition Williams identifies for the psych-action reading, the necessity-and-sufficiency presupposition (his (5b), citing Karttunen 1971a — "if John stopped, it is because he remembered to do it") is left to future work in the paper and is not encoded here.
Naming #
The English Fragment splits forget into two VerbEntry records:
forget (negative implicative, infinitival) and forget_rog
(factive/rogative, finite). Williams argues these are one lexical item
with uniform factivity and a frame-driven presupposition split (the
pre-existence analysis is formalized below). The Fragment split is a
practical separation of entailment patterns; White2014.lean makes the
consistency claim formal.
Whether a factive presupposition has modal content.
Following [Wil26]: with finite CPs and gerunds, the presupposition is non-modal (event truth); with plain infinitives, it is modal (Williams' (5a): "John was supposed to V").
- nonModal : PresupContent
Directly presupposes complement truth (Williams (4a)).
- modal : PresupContent
Presupposes a modalized proposition: covert Mod over the embedded VP, yielding an obligation reading (Williams (5a)).
Instances For
Equations
- Williams2026.instDecidableEqPresupContent x✝ y✝ = if h : x✝.ctorIdx = y✝.ctorIdx then isTrue ⋯ else isFalse ⋯
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- One or more equations did not get rendered due to their size.
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- Williams2026.instReprPresupContent = { reprPrec := Williams2026.instReprPresupContent.repr }
An empirical judgment about forget's presupposition in a given complement frame.
Every entry has a presupposition (uniform factivity per Williams).
The content field records the modal/non-modal split; the
implicativeNegative field records the orthogonal Karttunen
entailment that Williams (fn 1) brackets.
- frame : ComplementType
Complement frame being tested.
- sentence : String
Example sentence (Williams uses John throughout §1–§3.1).
- presupParaphrase : String
Paraphrase of what is presupposed.
- content : PresupContent
Modal vs. non-modal presupposition content.
- implicativeNegative : Bool
Negative implicative entailment (forgot to V → ¬V; Karttunen 1971a). Williams (fn 1) brackets this; recorded here for cross-paper consistency with [Kar71].
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- Williams2026.instReprForgetJudgment = { reprPrec := Williams2026.instReprForgetJudgment.repr }
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Cognition reading — finite CP #
Williams (1)/(4): "John forgot that he stopped by the flower shop" presupposes that John stopped. This is the canonical factive reading recognized since [KK70].
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Instances For
English PRO-ing gerund #
Williams (7)/(9), §3.1.1: "John forgot stopping by the flower shop" patterns with the finite-CP case (non-modal presupposition) — a critical datum against the Modalized Complement Analysis, which would predict a modal presupposition for any non-finite complement. The gerund is non-finite but not modalized. Test: continuation "...but he didn't stop by the flower shop" is judged infelicitous, indicating the lower-event presupposition is present.
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Psych-action reading — plain infinitive #
Williams (2)/(5), §1: "John forgot to stop by the flower shop" does not presuppose John stopped (and per the Karttunen tradition, entails he did not). What it presupposes (Williams (5a)) is the modalized proposition "John was supposed to stop by the flower shop". Williams' analysis (§4–§5): the plain infinitive's forward-oriented temporal profile violates the pre-existence presupposition, triggering covert Mod insertion that lets the obligation/plan be the target of the memory.
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The English data points covered in Williams §1 and §3.1.
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The pre-existence analysis (§4–§5) #
Williams' analysis (drawing on Bondarenko 2019/2020 on Buryat hanaxa): the factive's lower event must have started before the attitude event — PreEx(Q)(e)(w) ≡ ∃(e'', t). Q(λe'. e'=e'')(t)(w) ∧ LB(τ(e'')) < LB(τ(e)). Whether a complement inherently satisfies pre-existence depends on its temporal profile: finite CPs (tense) and PRO-ing gerunds (aspect) locate the embedded event no later than matrix time; plain infinitives are forward-oriented. Where pre-existence is not inherently satisfied, covert Mod insertion shifts the presupposition to the obligation/plan, which does pre-exist — the SMINC generalization (§3.1.3, (15)): Mod heads the complement of forget iff the embedded verb is a plain infinitive. The classifier below records the temporal-profile outcome per complement type; the event-semantic LB(τ) comparisons are the deferred deep form.
The complement type's temporal profile inherently satisfies the pre-existence presupposition: finite CPs (tense) and gerunds (aspect) locate the embedded event no later than matrix time; plain infinitives and the rest are forward-oriented.
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SMINC: covert Mod is inserted iff the complement does not inherently satisfy pre-existence.
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The pre-existence analysis matches every English datum: the presupposition is modal exactly where Mod insertion is predicted.
Against the Modalized Complement Analysis (§3.1.1) #
[Whi14] posits a covert root modal in every non-finite complement of forget. Williams' gerund datum refutes it: non-finite, yet non-modal.
The MCA's structural prediction ([Whi14], as reconstructed in Williams §3.1.1): modal insertion in every non-finite complement.
Equations
- Williams2026.MCAPredictsModal ct = (ct.isFinite = false)
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The paper's central empirical argument: on the gerund frame the MCA predicts a modal presupposition, pre-existence does not, and the datum is non-modal.
Williams' modal-presupposition split tracks Karttunen's implicative-negative entailment: the plain-infinitive frame is the locus of both. This is the cross-paper coherence claim — the two asymmetries identified in Williams' (1)/(2) (presupposition flip and implicative entailment flip) co-vary in the English data, even though Williams' analysis only addresses the presupposition side.