Abstract
This presentation analyses the semantico-pragmatic behavior of Spanish predicates creerse ‘to believe’ and pensarse ‘to think’ (formed from the propositional attitude verbs creer and pensar with the clitic se). It has been proposed that these predicates are contrafactive; that is, that they presuppose the falsity of their complement (Di Tullio 2018, Anvari et al. 2019, Saab and Carranza 2021, Maldonado and Percus 2024). In contradistinction, we advance a novel account according to which creerse and pensarse are only weakly contrafactive (see Glass 2025), to wit, they update the Common Ground so that it is compatible with the falsity of their complement. The strong contrafactive reading is obtained through pragmatic inference from the weak contrafactive meaning and the assumption that the speaker is opinionated about the issue. We contend that this weak contrafactive requirement is introduced not as a presupposition (a requirement on the Common Ground prior to the assertion) but as a conventional implicature (an automatic update to the Common Ground following the assertion). This distinguishes creerse and pensarse from other alleged weakly contafactive expressions like Chinese attitude verb yiwei, which has been analysed in terms of postsuppositions (Glass 2023). Finally, we show that creerse, unlike pensarse, can display evidential readings when it appears under negation, and we argue that this behavior accounts for why only the former can exhibit “non-contrafactive interpretations” in such contexts.
