The prosody of presupposition projection in naturally-occurring utterances

Some accounts of presupposition projection predict that pragmatic focus influences whether the presupposition projects (i.a., Abrusan 2011, 2016; Simons et al. 2017; Beaver et al. 2017). In several experimental studies, prosodically-marked pragmatic focus has indeed been found to influence the projection of factive presuppositions of utterances like these parents didn’t know the kid was gone (Cummins & Rohde 2015; Tonhauser 2016; Djarv & Bacovcin 2017). However, no prior work has explored whether this effect extends beyond lab speech to naturally-occurring utterances. In this paper, we investigate the relation between prosodically-marked focus and projection in a large set of naturally-occurring utterances. We find that prosodically-marked focus influences projection in utterances with factive predicates, but has no effect in utterances with non-factive predicates. Our findings therefore point toward an analysis of projection in terms of interacting information-structural utterance properties and lexically-encoded content.