Experimental Work in Presupposition and Presupposition Projection

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge of experimental approaches to the study of natural language meaning, both to get solid data on subtle phenomena hard to assess through introspection, and to understand how abstract characterizations of linguistic knowledge relate to real-time cognitive processes in language comprehension. The present paper reviews work in one of the most recent areas to see extensive experimental investigations, namely presupposition and presupposition projection. Presuppositions are at the very nexus of linguistically encoded content and contextual information, as they relate directly to the discourse context but also interact in intricate ways with their intra-sentential linguistic environment. They are thus extremely suitable for investigating the interplay of linguistic and more domain general processes in language comprehension, as well as for experimental investigations of subtle theoretical phenomena.

Processing Presuppositions and Implicatures: Similarities and Differences

“…The processing of Ps has been studied less than that of SIs. However, a number of recent studies have begun to fill this gap, using various processing measures to investigate Ps (see Schwarz, 2015Schwarz, , 2016a. In this section, we review two recent RT studies on Ps that are directly relevant for our purposes.…”

Presuppositions of determiners are immediately used to disambiguate utterance meaning: A mouse-tracking study on the German language

“…However, to the best of our knowledge, there is so far no work investigating adaptation effects of presuppositional information for online processing. Moreover, there is a vast amount of literature on the processing of felicitous and infelicitous uses of presuppositions in different contexts (see Schwarz 2007 ; Schwarz & Tiemann, 2012 ; Tiemann et al., 2011 ; Tiemann, 2014 ; for a recent review, see Schwarz, 2016 ), but almost no experimental investigations of when and how the interpretation of utterances may be affected by information encoded in the presuppositions of certain expressions. The present study tries to fill these gaps.…”

“…Experimental investigations of presuppositions have increased in recent years (for a recent review, see Schwarz, 2016 ). Here, we focus on studies dealing with (1) the early processing of presuppositions/inferences triggered by determiners, (2) differences between felicitous and infelicitous uses of determiners, and (3) potential differences between definite and indefinite determiner.…”

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“…Зачастую вербальное оформление рекламного дискурса (то, как пре-подносится факт, а не сам факт) косвенно, в со-вокупности создает положительный образ про-дукта и в дальнейшем влияет на действия по-купателей . Важную роль в таких случаях играют пресуппозиции -имплицитные умозаключения о фоновой ин-формации, которая принимается как данность Tantucci, 2016;Schwarz, 2016]. Это явление требует более пристального изу-чения в связи с широким применением в ре-кламном дискурсе.…”