The constraint-based approach to pragmatics assumes that listeners integrate probabilistic information from multiple sources to identify speaker meaning (e.g., Degen & Tanenhaus, 2019). This talk motivates a constraint-based approach to projection, the phenomenon whereby listeners can infer that speakers are committed to an utterance content even when that content is in the scope of an entailment-canceling operator. For instance, to identify whether Cam, who utters the question in (1), is committed to the content of the clausal complement, listeners integrate information from multiple sources (see, e.g., Tonhauser, Beaver, & Degen, 2018).

(1) Cam: Did Kim discover that Sandy’s work is plagiarized?

From the constraint-based perspective, the overarching research question then is: which information sources do listeners rely on in drawing projection inferences in the domain under investigation and how is the information from these sources integrated? In this talk, the constrained-based approach is empirically motivated on the basis of the findings of two comprehension experiments that reveal two novel information sources that influence listeners’ projection inferences: (i) the lexical content of the predicate and (ii) listeners’ prior beliefs. By forcing us to confront the multiple sources of information that listeners rely on in drawing projecting inferences, the constraint-based approach brings out a multitude of new research questions about projection cross-linguistically.

References

Degen, J., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2019). Constraint-based pragmatic processing. In C. Cummins & N. Katsos (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of experimental semantics and pragmatics (pp. 21–38). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Tonhauser, J., Beaver, D. I., & Degen, J. (2018). How projective is projective content? Gradience in projectivity and at-issueness. Journal of Semantics, 35(3), 495–542.