Events. Facts. Factivity [События. Факты. Фактивность]

This paper renders the event versus fact distinction in natural language ontologies. The existential logic offers a straightforward way of transforming accounts of events into accounts of facts: knowledge is based on facts, but hypotheses that specific events took place in the real world or in some accessible possible world can be truth-valued. I argue that one should acknowledge two presuppositions of factivity: factivity1 is linked with logically transitive knowledge obtained via a rational procedure, while factivity2 is linked with firm belief of X that p is true. Von Fintel’s wait-a-minute test applies both to factivity1 and to factivity2. The modern Russian language grammaticalized an aspectual meaning reserved for verified statements about specific events of the past. This meaning is identified as the general-factual meaning of the imperfective aspect. Its assertive component is the meaning of verification, while its presuppositional component corresponds to factivity2.