The social component of the projection behavior of clausal complement contents

Taylor Mahler

doi:10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4703

Abstract

Some accounts of presupposition projection predict that content's consistency with the Common Ground influences whether it projects (e.g., Heim 1983, Gazdar 1979a,b). I conducted an experiment to test whether Common Ground information about the speaker's social identity influences projection of clausal complement contents (CCs). Participants rated the projection of CCs conveying liberal or conservative political positions when the speaker was either Democrat- or Republican-affiliated. As expected, CCs were more projective when they conveyed political positions consistent with the speaker's political affiliation: liberal CCs were more projective with Democrat compared to Republican speakers, and conservative CCs were more projective with Republican compared to Democrat speakers. In addition, CCs associated with factive predicates (e.g., know) were more projective than those associated with non-factive predicates (e.g., believe). These findings suggest that social meaning influences projective meaning and that social meaning is constrained by semantic meaning, in line with previous research on the relation between other levels of linguistic structure/perception and social information.

Highlights

When speakers presuppose content, they often convey their commitment to its truth even when the content is not entailed
Consistency between the lexical content instantiating the clausal complement and the speaker’s social identity led to higher projection ratings than inconsistency: when the complement was instantiated by a liberal lexical content, projection ratings were higher when the speaker was Democrat; when the complement was instantiated by a conservative lexical content, projection ratings were higher when the speaker was Republican
The findings suggest that such information bears on how listeners reason about the consistency of the Common Ground with projective content: contents were more projective when they conveyed political positions consistent with the speaker’s social identity than when they were not

Summary

Introduction

They often convey their commitment to its truth even when the content is not entailed. The complement of know is embedded within the syntactic scope of an entailment-cancelling operator: negation in (1-a), a question in (1-b), an epistemic modal in (1-c), and an antecedent of a conditional in (1-d). The sentences in (1) permit readings on which the speaker is taken to be committed to truth of the CC of know. Content that displays such behavior is said to project (e.g., Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970; Karttunen 1971): despite being expressed by a constituent that is embedded within the scope of an entailment-cancelling operator, the speaker can be taken to be committed to the content’s truth. If Cindy knows that Obama improved the American economy, she’ll vote for him

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