Projection Without Lexically-specified Presupposition

(Please note that this meeting of the workshop is not happening at the usual day and time.)

I’ll present some recent research on presupposition projection, unpacking how a sentence like “Cole doesn’t know that Charley speaks Spanish” leads to the inference that Charley speaks Spanish, even though that information appears under entailment-cancelling negation. The analysis I’ll put forward derives projection inferences by reasoning pragmatically about utterance informativity with respect to the Question Under Discussion and private speaker assumptions. I’ll show that this reasoning-based analysis fares better than other contemporary analyses both empirically and conceptually; the analysis also extends seamlessly to entailment-cancelling operators beyond negation and projective content beyond “know”.