Toward a Taxonomy of Projective Content

Language 89 (1):66-109 (2013)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts's conventional implicatures, are contents that may project when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the FAMILY-OF-SENTENCES diagnostic. This article 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 generalizations to be examined and validated crosslinguistically. We apply the diagnostics in two languages, focusing on Paraguayan Guaraní, and comparing the results to those for English. Our study of Paraguayan Guaraní 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 subclasses of projective contents emerge. The resulting taxonomy of projective content has strong implications for contemporary theories of projection, which were developed for the projective properties of particular subclasses and fail to generalize to the full set of projective contents.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 98,109

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Analytics

Added to PP
2016-01-30

Downloads
93 (#193,455)

6 months
12 (#236,299)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Mandy Simons
Carnegie Mellon University

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references