What projects and why

By Mandy Simons, Judith Tonhauser, David I. Beaver, Craige Roberts. 2010

431 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Projection is widely used as a diagnostic for presupposition, but many expression types yield projection even though they do not have standard properties of presupposition, for example appositives, expressives, and honorifics (Potts 2005). While it is possible to analyze projection piecemeal, clearly a unitary explanation is to be preferred. Yet we show that standard explanations of projective behavior (common ground based theories, anaphoric theories, and multi-dimensional theories) do not extend to the full range of triggers. Instead, we propose an alternative explanation based on the following claim: Meanings project IFF they are not at-issue, where at-issueness is defined in terms of the Roberts' (1995) discourse theory. Thus, and despite their apparent heterogeneity, projective meaning triggers emerge as a natural class on the basis of the not at-issue status of their projective inference.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4dbe366b8b70825434c54f3569d027b8bf252bd

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Citations in the corpus

Sentic patterns: Dependency-based rules for concept-level sentiment analysis (2014, background): “It might prove difficult to be exhaustive in our description since projection is not a purely semantic problem but is also affected by pragmatic contextual factors [49].”
Inherent Disagreements in Human Textual Inferences (2019, background): “…evidence supporting the argument that humans’ semantic inferences are uncertain and context-sensitive (Poesio and Artstein, 2005; Versley, 2008; Simons et al., 2010; Recasens et al., 2011; de Marneffe et al., 2012; Passonneau et al., 2012; Pavlick and Callison-Burch, 2016a,b; Tonhauser et…”
Focus and uninformativity in Yucatec Maya questions (2012, background): “In terms of semantics, a number of recent works have emphasized that even wellstudied presuppositions in English can be sensitive to pragmatic factors such as the Question Under Discussion (e.g. Simons 2007, Simons et al. 2011).”
Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers (2011, background): “So it seems presuppositions are not as easily cancelable by the context as Simons et al. (2010) would have us believe.”
Lexicosyntactic Inference in Neural Models (2018, background): “…with the complex array of inferences that different open class lexical items trigger (Kiparsky and Kiparsky, 1970; Karttunen, 1971a,b; Horn, 1972; Karttunen and Peters, 1979; Heim, 1992; Si-mons, 2001, 2007; Simons et al., 2010; Abusch, 2002, 2010; Gajewski, 2007; Anand and Hac-quard, 2013, 2014).”
Toward a Taxonomy of Projective Content (2013, background): “SHAIN, CORY, and JUDITH TONHAUSER.”