Contracted attitudes

Abstract

Certain emotive factive reports and knowledge reports appear to violate their entailment relations in both embedded and unembedded environments. To account for these cases, I propose that these problematic attitude reports should be understood as instances of non-literal speech and, therefore, as cases that trigger a pragmatic mechanism of content subtraction. By adopting an analysis that employs this mechanism, this paper argues that the problematic cases ultimately convey unproblematic propositions that do not violate any entailments.