Evaluative adjective sentences
A question-based analysis of projection
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22130482 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Judith Tonhauser (0000-0002-6061-7120, University of Stuttgart), Marie-Catherine De Marneffe (The Ohio State University), Judith Degen (0000-0003-2513-0234, Stanford University) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2020-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Glossa a journal of general linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2397-1835 • E-ISSN: 2397-1835 |
| Publisher | Open Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5334/gjgl.701 |
| OpenAlex | W3082904857 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 46 |
Two contents of evaluative adjective sentences, like Kim was smart to watch the movie, are the prejacent (that Kim watched the movie) and the generalization (that the degree to which Kim watching the movie is smart was higher than the contextual standard of smart). The prejacent is standardly analyzed as a presupposition (e.g., Norrick 1978; Barker 2002; Oshima 2009; Kertz 2010). This paper argues against such analyses of the prejacent because, among other things, they do not capture an interaction between the prejacent and the generalization that has not yet been observed for projective content: when the prejacent projects, the generalization does not, and when the prejacent does not project, the generalization does. We develop an analysis according to which the prejacent is not a lexically specified presupposition but is projective to the extent that it is not at-issue with respect to the question addressed by the utterance of the evaluative adjective sentence. In addition to capturing the interaction between the prejacent and the generalization, our question-based projection analysis extends previous such analyses (e.g., Beaver & Clark 2008; Beaver et al. 2017; Simons et al. 2017) by incorporating a novel constraint on the question addressed by an utterance: the more the interpreter takes the truth of content c to follow from the common ground a priori, the less likely the question is about c. We provide experimental evidence for the analysis and argue that it improves on that of Karttunen et al. (2014), according to which evaluative adjectives are ambiguous
Adjective · Epistemology · Generalization · Linguistics · Noun · Presupposition · Sentence · Utterance · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Context and Content
The Logic of Conventional Implicatures
Sense and Sensitivity
The Dynamics of Vagueness
Rhetorical Structure Theory
The fallacy of placing confidence in confidence intervals
Regression Models for Ordinal Data
What projects and why
BRMS
At-issue Proposals and Appositive Impositions in Discourse
Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution
How Projective is Projective Content? Gradience in Projectivity and At-issueness
Experimental Evidence for the Truth Conditional Contribution and Shifting Information Status of Appositives
The Presuppositions of Soft Triggers are Obligatory Scalar Implicatures
A Note on Quasi-Presuppositions and Focus
Some observations on factivity
Varieties of update
Epistemic modals and context
Questions Under Discussion
Information structure in discourse
What Is Presupposition Accommodation, Again
Projection variability in Paraguayan Guaraní
The Best Question
Information Structure in Sentences
Notes on transitivity and theme in English
Between being wise and acting wise
Presupposition Triggering from Alternatives
Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers
Observations on embedding verbs, evidentiality, and presupposition
Presupposition cancellation
A theory of focus interpretation
Statistical methods for linguistic research
Presuppositions as nonassertions
Toward a Taxonomy of Projective Content
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |