Introduction: Presuppositions in Context—Theoretical Issues and Experimental Perspectives

Schwarz, Florian

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-07980-6_1

Cited by 45 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 95 publications

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“…Considering Ps first: the traditional approach is to analyse them as definedness conditions on admissible conversational contexts for the sentence carrying the presupposition. The gist of the idea is that a sentence like (16-a) is only felicitous in a context in which the presupposition in (16-b) is already assumed to be mutually accepted by the discourse participants (Karttunen, 1974;Stalnaker, 1974;Heim, 1982Heim, , 1983; see also Beaver and Geurts, 2012;Schwarz, 2015;Romoli and Sauerland, 2017 for an introduction to presuppositions).…”

Section: Presuppositionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Processing Presuppositions and Implicatures: Similarities and Differences

2018

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Presuppositions and scalar implicatures are traditionally considered to be distinct phenomena, but recent accounts analyze (at least some of) the former as the latter. All else being equal, this "scalar implicature approach to presuppositions" predicts uniform behavior for the two types of inferences. Initial experimental studies comparing them yielded conflicting results. While some found a difference in the Response Time (RT) patterns of scalar implicatures and presuppositions, others found them to be uniform. We argue that the difference in outcomes is attributable to a difference in the type of response being measured: RTs associated with acceptance and rejection responses seem to pattern in opposite ways. Next, we report on a series of experiments to support this, and to compare the behavior of the two inferences more comprehensively. Experiments Ia and Ib look at both acceptance and rejection responses for both inference types, and find uniform patterns once the acceptance vs. rejection variable is factored in. Experiment II adds a new dimension by testing for the influence of prosody on the two inference types, and in this regard a clear difference between them emerges, posing a first substantive challenge to the scalar implicature approach to presuppositions. A third set of experiments investigates yet another prediction of this approach, according to which the presuppositional inference is introduced as a simple entailment in affirmative contexts. This predicts that these presuppositional inferences behave parallel to other entailments. Experiment IIIa compares rejections of affirmative sentences based on either their presuppositional inference or their entailed content and finds that they differ, with greater RTs for the former. As an additional control, Experiments IIIb and IIIc test for parallel differences between two entailments associated with always, which yield uniform results. In sum, while Experiments Ia and Ib are in line with previous findings that presuppositions and scalar implicatures under negation show uniform response time patterns, the differences found in Experiments II and IIIa-c pose a substantial challenge to approaches assimilating the two phenomena, while being entirely in line with the traditional perspective of seeing them as distinct.

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Section: Presuppositionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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.…”

Section: The Processing Of Psmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Presuppositions and Implicatures: Similarities and Differences

2018

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“…It has long been established that a sentence seems most natural, and is most easily comprehended, when it meshes easily with the current shared model of the discourse in which it occurs (Bock & Mazzella, 1983; Clark & Haviland, 1977; Haviland & Clark, 1974; Schwarz,2015a). Sometimes a sentence requires that the discourse model must be adjusted to make sense of the sentence.…”

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“…Presupposition accommodation is one much-studied instance of accommodation where comprehenders add relevant information to the common ground even though it is only presupposed and not asserted. For instance, hearing John's son goes to UMass might lead a comprehender to add the previously unknown information that John has a son of college age, or at least accept that the speaker is speaking as if John has a son (Beaver & Zeevat, 2007; Lewis, 1978; Schwarz, 2015b). …”

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Accommodation to an unlikely episodic state

Clifton

Frazier

2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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Mini-discourses like (ia) seem slightly odd compared to their counterparts containing a conjunction (ib). (i) a. Speaker A: John or Bill left. Speaker B: Sam did too. b. Speaker A: John and Bill left. Speaker B: Sam did too. One possibility is that or in Speaker A's utterance in (ia) raises the potential Question Under Discussion (QUD) whether it was John or Bill who left and Speaker B's reply fails to address this QUD. A different possibility is that the epistemic state of the speaker of (ia) is somewhat unlikely or uneven: the speaker knows that someone left, and that it was John or Bill, but doesn't know which one. The results of four acceptability judgment studies confirmed that (ia) is less good or coherent than (ib) (Experiment 1), but not due to failure to address the QUD implicitly introduced by the disjunction because the penalty for disjunction persisted even in the presence of a different overt QUD (Experiment 2) and even when there was no reply to Speaker A (Experiment 3). The hypothesis that accommodating an unusual epistemic state might underlie the lower acceptability of disjunction was supported by the fact that the disjunction penalty is larger in past tense discourses than in future discourses, where partial knowledge of events is the norm (Experiment 4). The results of an eye tracking study revealed a penalty for disjunction relative to conjunction that was significantly smaller when a lead in (I wonder if it was…) explicitly introduced the disjunction. This interaction (connective X lead in) appeared in early measures on the disjunctive phrase itself, suggesting that the input is related to an inferred epistemic state of the speaker in a rapid and ongoing fashion.

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“…While presuppositions have, for a long time, been rather unexplored as a topic in the field of experimental pragmatics, in the last years, a new wave of studies (Schwarz, 2014 ; Domaneschi, 2015 ) have suggested that, while presuppositions are typically considered background meanings, expected to be processed automatically, the actual processing seems to involve a large chunk of the cognitive resources available to the language users, which affects the understanding of different kinds of presuppositions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selecting Presuppositions in Conditional Clauses. Results from a Psycholinguistic Experiment

et al. 2016

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In this paper, we propose an experiment concerning presupposition selection in conditional sentences containing a presupposition trigger in the consequent. Many theories claim that sentences like if p, qq'—where q is the presupposition of the assertive component q'—have unconditional presuppositions, namely, they simply project q. Other theories suggest that these kinds of conditional sentences project conditional presuppositions of the form if p, q. Data collected suggest two results: (i) in accordance with other experiments (by Romoli), dependence between the presupposition q and the antecedent p favors the selection of a conditional presupposition if p, q. (ii) presupposition selection in conditional sentences with a trigger in the consequent is affected by speakers' cognitive load: if speakers are highly cognitive loaded, then they are less disposed to select a conditional presupposition. We conclude by arguing that cognitive load represents a key factor for the analysis of linguistic and philosophical theories of context.

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Introduction: Presuppositions in Context—Theoretical Issues and Experimental Perspectives

Cited by 45 publications

References 95 publications

Processing Presuppositions and Implicatures: Similarities and Differences

Processing Presuppositions and Implicatures: Similarities and Differences

Accommodation to an unlikely episodic state

Selecting Presuppositions in Conditional Clauses. Results from a Psycholinguistic Experiment

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