Presuppositions cross-linguistically: A comparison of soft and hard triggers in Chinese and German

Abstract

Presuppositions are typically considered as projective inferences that are triggered by certain expressions and taken for granted. Whereas Simons (Simons, Mandy. 2001. On the conversational basis of some presuppositions. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 11. 431–448) observes that expressions with a similar semantic content belonging to the same language give rise to the same presupposition, this has not been investigated in a systematic way for semantically equivalent expressions from different languages. Furthermore, more recent research has shown that different presupposition triggers are characterized by differing projective strength, therefore, a distinction of highly projective hard triggers and less projective soft triggers has been proposed (Abusch, Dorit. 2002. Lexical alternatives as a source of pragmatic presuppositions. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 12. 1–19, Abusch, Dorit. 2010. Presupposition triggering from alternatives. Journal of Semantics 27(1). 37–80). Here, we present an experiment comparing four classical presupposition triggers from German and their counterparts in Chinese (cleft sentences, win, factive predicates regret and discover) in order to a) investigate the cross-linguistic stability of their projective strength and b) to verify the heterogeneity of these triggers in both languages. Our results show that the projective behavior and the heterogeneity of presuppositions can be considered cross-linguistically stable, at least when suitable equivalences for both languages can be found. Furthermore, our data suggest that the group of soft triggers has to be more heterogeneous than previously assumed. More precisely, whereas hard triggers behave the same way, it is possible that each soft trigger might be soft in its own way. In sum, our experimental investigation aims to improve the understanding of presuppositions, the underlying triggering process and their projective behavior across different languages.