David I. Beaver

Questions Under Discussion: Where Information Structure Meets Projective Content

Annual Review of Linguistics · 2016-11-04 · 194 citations

We discuss problems familiar from the literature on presupposition and information structure, and illustrate how a synthesis using the Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework yields fresh insight. In this framework, discourse is analyzed in terms of the strategy of inquiry pursued by the interlocutors, and individual utterances are interpreted relative to the question being addressed. This way of thinking offers a new perspective on diverse phenomena, including the projection of presupposition…

Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field

Linguistics · 2017-12-06 · 170 citations

Abstract This paper is a position statement on reproducible research in linguistics, including data citation and attribution, that represents the collective views of some 41 colleagues. Reproducibility can play a key role in increasing verification and accountability in linguistic research, and is a hallmark of social science research that is currently under-represented in our field. We believe that we need to take time as a discipline to clearly articulate our expectations for how linguistic da…

How Projective is Projective Content? Gradience in Projectivity and At-issueness

Journal of Semantics · 2018-05-28 · 130 citations

Projective content is utterance content that a speaker may be taken to be committed to even when the expression associated with the content occurs embedded under an entailment-canceling operator (e.g., Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990). It has long been observed that projective content varies in how projective it is (e.g., Karttunen, 1971; Simons, 2001; Abusch, 2010), though preliminary experimental research has been able to confirm only some of the intuitions about projection variability (e.g.…

The Best Question: Explaining the Projection Behavior of Factives

Discourse Processes · 2016-03-24 · 99 citations

This article deals with projection in factive sentences. The article first challenges standard assumptions by presenting a series of detailed observations about the interpretations of factive sentences in context, showing that what implication projects, if any, is quite variable and that projection is tightly constrained by prosodic and contextual information about the alternatives under consideration. The article then proposes an account which accommodates the variability of the data and sensit…

Toward a Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal · 2018-01-01 · 48 citations