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DIAGNOSING PROJECTIVE CONTENT IN BASQUE

Although projection has been usually attributed to the presuppositional content of an utterance,recent studies have shown that there are certain implications other than presupposition which are

projective (cf. Pott 2005). Since then, scholars have characterized several diagnostics in order to

test projectivity across languages (cf. Tonhauser et al. 2013). Hence, by application of thesediagnostics, the purpose of this study is to further enrich cross-linguistic research on projectivecontent through an analysis of Basque, a language spoken in the Basque Country.Following the methods proposed in Tonhauser et al. (2013) in order to test STRONG CONTEXTUALFELICITY CONSTRAINT and PROJECTION , this paper determines whether the contents triggered bythe adverb ere too, the demonstrative determiner hori that, change of state verbs such as utzi stop and the reportative evidential omen it is said are projective in Basque. In addition,

because it has been claimed that those contents that project are not-at-issue (Simons et al. 2010),this study also applies the diagnostics presented in Tonhauser (2012) to establish ( NOT -)AT -ISSUENESS .The empirical evidence for this study has been obtained from judgments of three Basque native

speakers. Results indicate that the implication that relevant alternatives exist of the Basqueadverbial ere too and the indication implication of the demonstrative determiner hori that areassociated with the strong contextual felicity constraint. Furthermore, the implications of thesetwo linguistic expressions are projective since they survive when the triggers ere too and hori that are embedded under the operators of the family of sentences diagnostic (Chierchia &McConnell-Ginet 1990). Additionally, in accordance with Simons et al. (2010), the implicationsof these two linguistic expressions are not-at-issue. With regard to the prestate implication of theverb utzi stop, although not associated with a strong contextual felicity constraint, the

judgments obtained from Basque native speakers reveal that it is projective and that its content isnot-at-issue.As for the behavior of the reportative evidential omen it is said , the implication that someone

who is not the speaker said p is neither associated with a strong contextual felicity constraint noris its content at-issue. Moreover, regarding its projectivity, when embedding omen it is saidunder negation, the former takes scope over negation which suggests that the reportativeevidential is not projective. In addition, as pointed out by Zubeldia (2009), omen it is saidcannot occur in questions or the antecedent of a conditional and, on top of that, it is incompatiblewith epistemic modality (Etxepare 2009).Up to now, only data from English and Guaran had been analyzed by means of thesediagnostics. This study corroborates the results reported for these two languages (Tonhauser etal. 2013) in a third, typologically unrelated language. Regarding omen it is said, results seem tosuggest that this reportative evidential behaves in the lines of the Quechua reportative evidential(Faller 2002) or the Cheyenne reportative evidential (Murray 2010), but contrasts with the

Tagalog reportative evidential which has been found to project (Kierstead & Martin 2012).

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REFERENCES

Chierchia, Gennaro and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1990. Meaning and Grammar . Cambridge, MA:MIT press.

Etxepare, Rikardo. 2009. Evidential configurations in Basque. Workshop on Clause Types,Fdration TUL, Paris.Faller, Marina. 2002. Semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in Cuzco Quechua : Stanford

University dissertation.Kierstead, Gregory and Scott Martin. 2012. A multistratal account of projective Tagalog

evidential daw. Proceedings of SALT 22: 326 346.Murray, Sarah E. 2010. Evidentiality and the structure of speech acts : Rutgers University

dissertation.Potts, Christopher. 2005. The Logic of Conventional Implicatures . Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Simons, Mandy, Judith Tonhauser, David Beaver, and Craige Roberts. 2010. What projects and

why. In Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 21 , 309 327. Ithaca, NY: CLCPublications.Tonhauser, Judith. 2012. Diagnosing (not-)at-issue content. In Proceedings of Semantics of

Under-represented Languages of the Americas (SULA) 6 , 6239-54.Tonhauser, Judith, David Beaver, Craige Roberts and Mandy Simons. 2013. Towards a

taxonomy of projective content. In Language 89, 1, 66-109.Zubeldia, Larraitz. 2009. Omen partikularen azterketa semantiko eta pragm atikoa. In Gogoa , 9,

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