Javanese veridicality mismatches: Q-to-P reduction amid uniformity

Abstract

This paper examines a surprising counterexample to the Spector & Egré’s (2015) generalization that interrogative and declarative complements of responsive verbs match in veridicality: Javanese predicates ngêrti ‘know’ and kèlingan ‘remember’ are veridical with respect to the interrogative CPs, but not with respect to declaratives. I propose that this pattern is problematic for P-to-Q and Uniformity approaches that bake in the answerhood operator (ANS) into the meaning of the embedding verb, and propose an account that derives the Javanese pattern by maintaining the uniformity of semantic types, yet mimicking the Q-to-P reduction.