Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Certain content of a linguistic construction can project whenthe construction is embedded in entailment-canceling environ-ments. For example, the conclusion that John smoked in thepast from the utterance John stopped smoking still holds forJohn didn’t stop smoking, in which the original utterance isembedded under negation. There are two main approaches toaccount for projection phenomena. The semantic approach addsrestrictions of the common ground to the conventional meaning.The pragmatic approach tries to derive projection from generalconversational principles. In this paper we build a probabilisticmodel of language understanding in which the listener jointlyinfers the world state and what common ground the speakerhas assumed. We take change-of-state verbs as an exampleand model its projective content under negation. Under certainassumptions, the model predicts the projective behavior and itsinteraction with the question under discussion (QUD), withoutany special semantic treatment of projective content.