Assertion

Stalnaker, Robert

doi:10.1163/9789004368873_013

Cited by 863 publications

(263 citation statements)

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“…Accordingly, a speaker who asserts either of (1) or (2) is committed to the truth of (3a) and (3b) (Grice, 1975;Williamson, 1996). If the hearer trusts the speaker, he or she will also accept (3a) and (3b), and this information will then become shared knowledge, or common ground, between them for the remainder of the discourse, where the common ground is the set of assumptions taken for granted in the conversation by speaker and hearer (Clark, 1996;Clark & Marshall, 1981;Heim, 1983a;Karttunen, 1974;Lewis, 1969;Stalnaker, 1974Stalnaker, , 1978Stalnaker, , 1998Stalnaker, , 2002.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accommodating Presuppositions Is Inappropriate in Implausible Contexts

et al. 2015

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According to one view of linguistic information (Karttunen, 1974;Stalnaker, 1974), a speaker can convey contextually new information in one of two ways: (a) by asserting the content as new information; or (b) by presupposing the content as given information which would then have to be accommodated. This distinction predicts that it is conversationally more appropriate to assert implausible information rather than presuppose it (e.g., Heim, 1992;Stalnaker, 2002;von Fintel, 2008). A second view rejects the assumption that presuppositions are accommodated; instead, presuppositions are assimilated into asserted content and both are correspondingly open to challenge (e.g., Gazdar, 1979;van der Sandt, 1992). Under this view, we should not expect to find a difference in conversational appropriateness between asserting implausible information and presupposing it. To distinguish between these two views of linguistic information, we performed two self-paced reading experiments with an on-line stops-making-sense judgment.The results of the two experiments -using the presupposition triggers the and too -show that accommodation is inappropriate (makes less sense) relative to non-presuppositional controls when the presupposed information is implausible but not when it is plausible. These results provide support for the first view of linguistic information: the contrast in implausible contexts can only be explained if there is a presupposition-assertion distinction and accommodation is a mechanism dedicated to reasoning about presuppositions.3

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accommodating Presuppositions Is Inappropriate in Implausible Contexts

et al. 2015

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“…Research in this area has largely been pioneered by H. H. Clark and colleagues and by Garrod and colleagues (see H. H. Clark, 1994;and Garrod, 1999, for a review). One important aspect of the interaction concerns the identi cation of 'common ground' between speaker and hearer (H. H. Clark & Marshall, 1981;Stalnaker, 1978), requiring speaker and hearer to have some representation of what is in the other's discourse representation. A further aspect concerns inferences at a more social level, regarding the speaker's intentions and the hearer's requirements.…”

Section: Sentences Discourse and Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The language machine: Psycholinguistics in review

Altmann

2001

British J of Psychology

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Psycholinguistics is the empirical and theoretical study of the mental faculty that underpins our consummate linguistic agility. This review takes a broad look at how the field has developed, from the turn of the 20th century through to the turn of the 21st. Since the linguistic revolution of the mid-1960s, the field has broadened to encompass a wide range of topics and disciplines. A selection of these is reviewed here, starting with a brief overview of the origins of psycholinguistics. More detailed sections describe the language abilities of newborn infants; infants' later abilities as they acquire their first words and develop their first grammatical skills; the representation and access of words (both spoken and written) in the mental lexicon; the representations and processes implicated in sentence processing and discourse comprehension; and finally, the manner in which, as we speak, we produce words and sentences. Psycholinguistics is as much about the study of the human mind itself as it is about the study of that mind's ability to communicate and comprehend.

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“…Models of discourse differ greatly depending on whether they originate in philosophy (e.g., Kamp, 1981;Lewis, 1979;Stalnaker, 1978), linguistics (Heim, 1983), artificial intelligence (Grosz & Sidner, 1986;Reichman, 1978;Polanyi and Scha, 1985), or psychology (Clark & Haviland, 1977;Johnson-Laird, 1983;van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983). Still, in one way or another, most of them make three assumptions.…”

Section: The Course Of Discourse "mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When people take part in a conversation, they bring with them a certain amount of baggage-prior beliefs, assumptions, and other information. Part of that baggage is their common ground, which Stalnaker (1978) described this way: "Roughly speaking, the presuppositions of a speaker are the propositions whose truth he takes for granted as part of the background of the conversation. .…”

Section: The Course Of Discourse "mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…He will have understood it as intended, and the two of them can mutually believe this. A few models (e.g., Grosz & Sidner, 1986;Litman & Allen, 1987;Stalnaker, 1978) tacitly make a weaker, conditional idealization: Each participant assumes that the content of an utterance is added to common ground unless there is evidence to the contrary. Ann and Bob repair any troubles they encounter with Ann's utterance, and once they have done that, they add its contents to common ground.…”

Section: The Course Of Discourse "mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Contributing to Discourse

1989

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For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations.

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Assertion

Cited by 863 publications

References 0 publications

Accommodating Presuppositions Is Inappropriate in Implausible Contexts

Accommodating Presuppositions Is Inappropriate in Implausible Contexts

The language machine: Psycholinguistics in review

Contributing to Discourse

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