Projection and belief in K’ichee’: two examples of crosslinguistic semantic variation

Dan Velleman, University of Texas at Austin This paper presents a study of projective meaning — a category which subsumes presuppositions and conventional implicatures [1, 2, 4] — in the Mayan language K’ichee’. The study is based on a set of diagnostics developed by Tonhauser et al. [5], which are meant to be applicable in fieldwork situations in any language. We find the Tonhauser et al. protocol must be refined in order to be useful in K’ichee’. One of the diagnostics crucially depends on a property of English belief verbs which — we show — K’ichee’ lexical belief verbs do not share. Having cleared this methodological hurdle, we present results showing that highly similar projective meaning components may behave quite differently in different languages. Specifically, the additive implication of an additive particle (e.g. of English also or K’ichee’ choqe’ ‘also’) behaves differently in K’ichee’ than it does in other languages that have been studied so far.