“Toward a taxonomy of projective content” (Language 89.1, 2013), authored by Judith Tonhauser (Ohio State University), David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin), Craige Roberts (Ohio State University), and Mandy Simons (Carnegie Mellon University), has been selected to receive the LSA’s Best Paper in Language Award. This award, made for the first time in 2012, is given for the best paper published in the journal in any given year.  The award will be presented at the LSA 2014 Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, on Saturday, January 4th, at a ceremony immediately preceding the Presidential Address, beginning at 5:30pm.

Text of Award Citation:

‘Toward a taxonomy of projective content’ unpacks current conceptions of presupposition and conventional implicature to refine our understanding of projective content generally. It establishes a series of diagnostics about projective contents that form part of a toolkit for cross-linguistic study. Based on a detailed and careful examination of English and of the understudied language Paraguayan Guaraní, the authors propose a novel dossier of subclasses of projective content. The sophistication of the work on Guaraní stands out, as does the toolkit that will enable similar research on other languages, allowing a much broader base of languages from which to understand the nature of projective content, and serving as a model for other cross-linguistic work in pragmatics.'