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Lecture: A reasoning-based analysis of the presupposition of "know"

The content of the clausal complement of "know" is standardly analyzed as a presupposition: For example, interpreters typically infer from a speaker's utterance of "Cole didn't know that Julian dances salsa" that Julian dances salsa, even though this content is contributed in the scope of sentential negation. In this talk, which is based on joint work with Gregory Scontras (UC Irvine), I present a reasoning-based analysis of the projection of the content of the clausal complement of "know". Our model, formulated within the Bayesian Rational Speech Act framework (Frank and Goodman, 2012), derives projection from lexical entailments of "know" and sensitivity to the Question Under Discussion (QUD; as do Abrusán, 2011, and Simons, Beaver, Roberts, and Tonhauser, 2017), as well as reasoning about utterance informativity relative to private speaker assumptions (Qing, Goodman, and Lassiter, 2016; Warstadt, 2022). Crucially, our model predicts projection for "know" without encoding the inference as a lexically-specified constraint on the Common Ground (e.g., Heim 1983; van der Sandt 1992). The talk shows that the model makes better empirical predictions than other contemporary analyses of presuppositions by correctly deriving that projection is sensitive to the Question Under Discussion and to interpreters' prior beliefs.

Info

Day: 2025-11-13
Start time: 10:45
Duration: 01:30
Room: M18.11
Track: Keynote
Language: en

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