On the information structure sensitivity of projective content

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of an experiment designed to investigate the information structure sensitivity of the projective contents associated with again, stop and manner adverbs. In contrast to the prejacent of manner adverbs, whose projectivity is expected to be sensitive to information structural focus (e.g., Abrusán, 2013a; Stevens et al., 2017), that of the prejacent of again is not (e.g., Beck, 2006; Abrusán, 2013b). We also investigated the pre-state content associated with stop because projection analyses differ in their predictions regarding the sensitivity of this projective content to information structural focus (e.g., Heim, 1983; van der Sandt, 1992; Kadmon, 2001; Simons, 2001; Abrusán, 2011, 2016; Romoli, 2011, 2015). We found that the projectivity of all three contents is sensitive to prosodically marked focus and discuss the implications of our findings for empirically adequate projection analyses.