Judith Tonhauser

The Best Question: Explaining the Projection Behavior of Factives

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 sensitivity to contextual alternatives. The account is formulated within a modified version of Roberts 1996/2012 question-based model of discourse.

Word Order in Paraguayan Guaraní

This paper explores constraints on clausal word order in Paraguayan Guaraní on the basis of a corpus of naturally occurring data. We find that grammatical function is a strong predictor of word order for direct objects, since they are almost exclusively realized postverbally, as well as for indirect objects, which all occur postverbally. The placement of subjects, however, depends on a variety of factors, in particular discourse status and the transitivity of the verb. We find only partial support for the claim that Paraguayan Guaraní has a basic subject-verb-object word order (e.g., Gregores and Suárez 1967), since there does not seem to be a basic position for subjects. We conclude by comparing constraints on word order in Paraguayan Guaraní to constraints reported for other Tupí-Guaraní languages.

The synchrony and diachrony of differential object marking in Paraguayan Guaraní

This paper explores the synchrony and diachrony of differential object marking in Paraguayan Guarani on the basis of a quantitative study of a corpus of naturally occurring data of the modern language and an investigation of object marking in a 17th-century catechism. We show that both animacy and topicality, but not definiteness, affect whether a direct object is marked in modern Guarani, a finding that has implications for cross-linguistic theories of differential object marking, not all of which recognize topicality as a factor. We also find no categorical constraints on differential object marking in Guarani, contrary to Bossong (1985b). Our study of the 17th-century catechism provides further support for Bossongs (1985b, 2009) claim that Guarani did not have differential object marking when it came into contact with Spanish. The paper concludes with a discussion of the hypothesis that differential object marking in Guarani resulted from contact with Spanish.

The Prosody of Focus in Paraguayan Guaraní1

In many languages, prosodic prominence indicates which expressions of an utterance are focused. This study explores the prosody of focus in Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní) through two production and two perception experiments conducted with native speakers of Guaraní in Paraguay. The results of the production experiments suggest that prosodic prominence is realized by stressed syllable duration, f0 slope, and pitch accent type. While the perception experiments provide evidence that Paraguayan Guaraní listeners attend to these properties in prosodic prominence perception, they also show that listeners are not at ceiling in identifying the prosodically most prominent expression from the acoustic signal alone. These results are consistent with recent findings about prosodic prominence perception in other languages and provide empirical support from an American indigenous language for the hypothesis that non-acoustic factors, such as word frequency and information status, also play a role in prominence perception. [Keywords: Paraguayan Guaraní, focus, prosody, prominence perception]

Contextual predictability and the prosodic realisation of focus: a cross-linguistic comparison

This study explored the effect of contextual predictability on the prosodic realisation of focussed expressions in American English and Paraguayan Guaraní. Pairs of native speakers played an interactive game to elicit utterances that varied in the location of focus in the NP and whether this location was predictable from visual context. The English results confirmed that focussed expressions had more rising pitch accents, longer durations, and higher f0 than non-focussed expressions. Differences between focussed and non-focussed expressions were enhanced when the location of focus was not predictable from context. The Guaraní results confirmed that focussed expressions had distinctive pitch accent and duration patterns relative to non-focussed expressions. Overall prosodic prominence was enhanced when the location of focus was not predictable from context. These results, which are discussed within information-based theories of language production, suggest contextual predictability affects the prosodic realisation of focus, and that this predictability-dependence varies across languages.

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

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 and 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., Smith and Hall 2011; Xue and Onea 2011). Given the sparse empirical evidence for projection variability, the first goal of this paper was to investigate projection variability for projective content associated with 19 expressions of American English. The second goal was to explore the hypothesis, called the Gradient Projection Principle, that content projects to the extent that it is not at-issue. The findings of two pairs of experiments provide robust empirical evidence for projection variability and for the Gradient Projection Principle. We show that many analyses of projection cannot account for the observed projection variability and discuss the implications of our finding that projective content varies in its atissueness for an empirically adequate analysis of projection.

The Distribution of Implicit Arguments in Paraguayan Guaraní

In Paraguayan Guaraní, cross-reference markers, independent pronouns and other noun phrases, as well as combinations thereof, may realize the arguments of the main predicate of a clause. In example (1a), the proto-patient argument of the transitive predicate stem -hayhu ‘love’ (realized as -rayhu for morphophonological reasons), which is the speaker, is realized by the first person singular set B cross-reference marker che‘B1sg’ on the stem.2