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Introduction: Presuppositions in Context—Theoretical Issues and Experimental Perspectives

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Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 45))

Abstract

A central issue in semantics and pragmatics is to understand how various different aspects of meaning contribute to the overall conveyed meaning of an utterance. Asserted content, implicatures, and presuppositions are commonly assumed to differ in terms of their source, their status, and their interaction with the context in the theoretical literature. This chapter starts with a brief introduction of this theoretical background, and then reviews the experimental literature on related phenomena in some detail, with a focus on presuppositions. In the course of this, the contributions to the present volume are situated in the context of previous work. The conclusion provides an outlook on future directions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For surveys of psycholinguistic work on semantics more generally, see Frazier (2012) and Pylkkänen and McElree (2006).

  2. 2.

    Also see Destruel et al.(2014) for further discussion of cancellation tests.

  3. 3.

    The actual reasoning is more involved than that, and as I hinted at, other maxims (such as Relevance) could come into play as well.

  4. 4.

    The full system of Heim (1982), which provides an analysis of anaphoric interpretations of definites, extends this basic view of contexts to include assignment functions.

  5. 5.

    Note that both the extent of this success and the explanatory adequacy of the proposal have been questioned in the subsequent literature (see below).

  6. 6.

    For a more general recent review of a similar range of topics, see Noveck and Reboul (2008).

  7. 7.

    See Gibson and Pearlmutter (2011) and Gundel and Hedberg (2008) for recent collections of relevant work.

  8. 8.

    For even more recent results extending this approach to the triggers stop and again, see Schwarz (2014c).

  9. 9.

    But see Singh et al. (2013) for results suggesting that accommodation of too may be easier than previously thought.

  10. 10.

    For another recent contribution to this topic looking at disjunction, see Hirsch and Hackl (2013).

  11. 11.

    For an earlier study along similar lines looking at asserted vs. presupposed content introduced by only, see Kim (2007).

  12. 12.

    Direct evidence for processing costs of accommodation has been hard to come by. Perhaps the most convincing result in this regard comes from the accommodation study by Tiemann et al. (2011), which finds longer readings times on critical words in neutral contexts as compared to both verifying and falsifying contexts.

  13. 13.

    See Moulton (2007) for an earlier proposal of minimize accommodation based on experimental work on ellipsis resolution. For yet another recent study in this area that only came to my attention after writing this chapter, see Domaneschi et al. (2013).

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Acknowledgement

The writing of this introduction benefitted substantially from discussions in a seminar I taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2013. Many thanks to the students in this class, as well as to Alan Munn, for extensive and insightful comments on the topics considered here.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, 619 Williams Hall, 255 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Florian Schwarz

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    Florian Schwarz

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Schwarz, F. (2015). Introduction: Presuppositions in Context—Theoretical Issues and Experimental Perspectives. In: Schwarz, F. (eds) Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 45. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07980-6_1

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