A multistratal account of the projective Tagalog evidential ‘daw’

Abstract

We present original fieldwork data as evidence that the Tagalog reportative evidential daw projects, like e.g. presuppositions and conventional implicatures (CIs), in the sense that daw can carry an implication that is immune to entailment-modifying operators. Previous work has purported that evidentials in other languages can project, but after examining these claims, we argue that the data we give for daw constitute the first evidence of a projective evidential. We then give a formally explicit account of daw in a multistratal semantics that is both dynamic and compositional. This semantics is general enough to also capture the behavior of English CIs, but avoids a well-known flaw in a previous theory of CIs due to Potts.