Craige Roberts and Judith Tonhauser. Projective meaning: Formal approaches and cross-linguistic evidence

Projective meanings are meaning elements which tend to survive as utterance implications even when the triggering expression is embedded under the syntactic scope of entailment-cancelling operators, such as classical presupposition triggers, but also Conventional Implicatures, some evidentials, and other non-presuppositional but projecting content. This (advanced) course introduces students to the study and formal analysis of projective meanings from a cross-linguistic perspective. In the first part of the course, students explore the range of phenomena that have been introduced as projective in English, the tests and diagnostics used to identify projective meanings, as well as first results from applying these tests and diagnostics to potentially projective meanings in other languages, in particular Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní). The second part of the course focuses on formal analyses of projection (e.g. Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Potts’ 2005) and the feasibility of extending such analyses to the full range of projective meanings.

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