Towards a taxonomy of projective content

Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts’ (2005) conventional implicatures, are meanings which are projected when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the ‘Family of Sentences’ diagnostic (e.g. Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990). This paper establishes distinctions among projective contents on the basis of a series of diagnostics, including a variant of the Family of Sentences diagnostic, that can be applied with linguistically untrained consultants in the field and the laboratory. These diagnostics are intended to serve as part of a toolkit for exploring projective contents across languages, thus allowing the validity of generalizations to be examined cross-linguistically. We apply the diagnostics in two languages, focussing on Paraguayan Guaranı́ (Tupı́-Guaranı́), and comparing the results to those for English. Our study of Paraguayan Guaranı́ is the first systematic exploration of projective content in a language other than English. Based on the application of our diagnostics to a wide range of constructions, four meaningful subclasses of projective contents emerge. The resulting taxonomy of projective content has strong implications for contemporary theories of projection (e.g. Karttunen 1974; Heim 1983; van der Sandt 1992; Potts 2005; Schlenker 2009), which were developed for the projective properties of subclasses and fail to generalize to the full set of projective contents. Contact information: Judith Tonhauser (corresponding author) 222 Oxley Hall, 1712 Neil Ave Columbus, OH 43210 [email protected] David Beaver Calhoun Hall 414, 1 University Station B5100, Austin, TX 78712 [email protected] Craige Roberts 222 Oxley Hall, 1712 Neil Ave Columbus, OH 43210 [email protected] Mandy Simons Baker Hall 135, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 [email protected] Acknowledgments: For helpful feedback and discussions, we thank Maria Bittner, Chris Barker, Lucas Champollion, Kai von Fintel, Lisa Matthewson and E. Allyn Smith, as well as the participants of the three workshops on Projection, Entailment, Presupposition and Assertion (PEPA) in Columbus, Ohio, 2009, Vancouver, Canada, 2010, and Rutgers, New Jersey, 2011, the participants of the 2011 ESSLLI course on projective content, and the audiences at a colloquium at the University of Tübingen in June 2011, at the 2011 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and at Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas (SULA) 6. We also thank our Paraguayan Guaranı́ language consultants for working with us, especially Marité Maldonado, Evert Ojeda Morán, and Julio Rolon. This project is financially supported by a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation to David Beaver, Craige Roberts, Mandy Simons and Judith Tonhauser (‘Collaborative Research: Semantics and Pragmatics of Projective Meaning across Languages’; grants #0952571 (OSU), #0952497 (CMU), #0952862 (UT Austin); 2010-12).