The social component of the projection behavior of clausal complement contents

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 stereotypical 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.

Clause-embedding predicates are often assumed to divide into two classes depending on whether they lexically encode the presupposition of their complements: factive predicates like know encode this presupposition, whereas non-factive predicates like think and believe do not

Other approaches derive (at least some cases of) presupposition projection from general pragmatic principles (e.g., Stalnaker 1974; Bo¨er & Lycan 1976; Karttunen & Peters 1979; Simons 2001, 2005; Abrus´an 2011). A prominent and well-developed approach within this camp has proposed that information-structural properties of utterances predict projection behavior (e.g., Abbott 2000; Simons 2001, 2007; Simons et al. 2010, 2017; Beaver et al. 2017; Tonhauser et al. 2018). Proponents of this approach hypothesize that whether content projects depends on whether it is at-issue in the discourse. Content that addresses the Question Under Discussion (QUD; Roberts 1996/2012) is at-issue and predicted to be non-projective. Content that does not address the QUD is not-at-issue and predicted to project. For example, when (1-a) is uttered in a context in which the QUD is Did Obama improve the American economy?, the CC of know is predicted not to project since it addresses the QUD and is hence at-issue. When the same sentence is uttered in a context in which the QUD is What cognitive relation does Ben have to the proposition that Obama improved the American economy?, the CC of know is predicted to project since it does not address the QUD and is hence not-at-issue.

These approaches highlight two different properties of content that have been implicated in projection: consistency with the Common Ground and at-issueness. As Beaver et al. (2017) point out, these properties are related: content that is entailed by, and hence consistent with, the Common Ground is not-at-issue and predicted to project.

The lexical content instantiating the clausal complement was manipulated such that it conveyed either a liberal political position (Obama improved the American economy) or a conservative political position (Obama damaged the American economy). The speaker’s political affiliation was manipulated by presenting each sentence as the utterance of either a Republican or Democrat-affiliated speaker.

(3) Cindy doesn’t fknow/believeg that Obama fimproved, damagedg the American economy.

If consistency with Common Ground social information influences projection, CCs that are consistent with liberal ideologies will project more with Democrat speakers and CCs that are consistent with conservative ideologies will project more with Republican speakers