Evaluative adjective sentences: A question-based analysis of projection

Two contents of evaluative adjective sentences, like Kim was smart to watch the movie, are the prejacent (that Kim watched the movie) and the generalization (that the degree to which Kim watching the movie is smart was higher than the contextual standard of smart). The prejacent is standardly analyzed as a presupposition (e.g., Norrick 1978; Barker 2002; Oshima 2009; Kertz 2010). This paper argues against such analyses of the prejacent because, among other things, they do not capture an interaction between the prejacent and the generalization that has not yet been observed for projective content: when the prejacent projects, the generalization does not, and when the prejacent does not project, the generalization does. We develop an analysis according to which the prejacent is not a lexically specified presupposition but is projective to the extent that it is not at-issue with respect to the question addressed by the utterance of the evaluative adjective sentence. In addition to capturing the interaction between the prejacent and the generalization, our question-based projection analysis extends previous such analyses (e.g., Beaver & Clark 2008; Beaver et al. 2017; Simons et al. 2017) by incorporating a novel constraint on the question addressed by an utterance: the more the interpreter takes the truth of content c to follow from the common ground a priori, the less likely the question is about c. We provide experimental evidence for the analysis and argue that it improves on that of Karttunen et al. (2014), according to which evaluative adjectives are ambiguous.