{"pk":26992,"title":"Rational use of prosody predicts projection in manner adverb utterances","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Speakers can be taken to be committed to utterance con-tent even when that content is contributed in the scope ofan entailment-canceling operator, like negation (e.g., Chier-chia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990). We develop a probabilisticmodel of this phenomenon, called ‘projection’, that relies onthe prosodic realization of utterances. We synthesize exist-ing theoretical claims about prosody, information structure andprojection into a model that assumes a rational speaker (Frank& Goodman, 2012) who produces utterances with prosodicmelodies that can signal which utterance content she is com-mitted to. Predictions of the probabilistic model are comparedto the responses of an experiment designed to test the effect ofprosody on projection in manner adverb utterances. Key be-haviors of the model are borne out empirically, and the quan-titative fit is surprisingly good given that the model has onlyone free parameter. Our findings lend support to analyses ofprojection that are sensitive to the information structure of ut-terances (e.g., Simons, Beaver, Roberts, & Tonhauser, 2017).","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Projection; prosody; information structure; proba-bilistic pragmatics; rational speech acts; manner adverbs"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8p82k85g","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jon","middle_name":"Scott","last_name":"Stevens","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Ohio State University","department":""},{"first_name":"Marie-Catherine","middle_name":"","last_name":"de Marneffe","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Ohio State University","department":""},{"first_name":"Shari","middle_name":"R.","last_name":"Speer","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Ohio State University","department":""},{"first_name":"Judith","middle_name":"","last_name":"Tonhauser","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Ohio State University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26992/galley/16628/download/"}]}