Semantics circle: Predicting within-utterance projection variation

Abstract

Utterances of positive sentences with know (like Cole knows that Charley speaks Spanish) entail the content of the clausal complement (CC; here, that Charley speaks Spanish) and the attitude holder’s belief in this content (BEL; here, that Cole believes that Charley speaks Spanish). CC and BEL differ in how likely they are to be inferred from utterances of negative variants (like Cole doesn’t know that Charley speaks Spanish); specifically, CC is assumed to typically project from under negation, while BEL is not. Most contemporary formal analyses predict this within-utterance projection variation in two steps: First, CC is taken to have a special status, as a presupposition, compared to BEL, and second, presuppositions are predicted to typically project (e.g., Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Abusch 2002, Abrusán 2011, Romoli 2015, Schlenker 2021, Roberts and Simons 2024). In contrast, CC and BEL do not differ in status in Scontras and Tonhauser 2025, where projection inferences (of varying strength) are derived by reasoning pragmatically about utterance informativity with respect to the Question Under Discussion and private speaker assumptions. This talk presents an empirical and a conceptual argument in favor of Scontras and Tonhauser’s 2025 reasoning-based analysis. The empirical argument comes from experiment results that suggest that BEL is projective (relative to a non-projection baseline); this is not captured by the two-step analyses, which do not analyze BEL as a presupposition and therefore do not make predictions about its projection. The conceptual argument is that Scontras and Tonhauser’s 2025 reasoning-based analysis can capture the projection of CC without assigning a special status to it. More generally, the talk argues that reasoning-based analyses provide a promising path towards formally analyzing observed projection variation, including that of non-presupposed content (e.g., Degen & Tonhauser 2022). The talk will then show that the analysis can also be extended to other entailment-canceling operators (questions) and presupposition triggers (stop).

References

Abusch. D. 2002. Lexical alternatives as a source of pragmatic presupposition. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 12:1–19.

Abrusán, M. 2011. Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers. Linguistics & Philosophy 34:491–535.

Heim, I. 1983. On the projection problem for presuppositions. WCCFL 2:114–125.

Roberts, C. and M. Simons 2024. Preconditions and projection: Explaining non-anaphoric presupposition. Linguistics & Philosophy 47:703–748.

Romoli, J. 2015. The presuppositions of soft triggers are obligatory scalar implicatures. J of Semantics 32:173–291.

Schlenker, P. 2021. Triggering presuppositions. Glossa 6:1–28.

Scontras, G. and J. Tonhauser 2025. Projection without presupposition: A model of clause-embedding predicates. Sinn und Bedeutung 29.

van der Sandt, R. 1992. Presupposition projection as anaphora resolution. J of Semantics 9:333–377.

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