Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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).