Speaker: Florian Schwarz (UPenn) Title: Presupposition Projection from Disjunction – Unconditionally Symmetric? Date and time: Wednesday, December 09, 3:00 PM Room: 32-D461
The nature of presupposition projection from disjunction continues to be controversial in the literature, both empirically and theoretically: Does it yield a conditional or non-conditional presupposition? Is it symmetric for both disjuncts? Is local accommodation within a disjunct possible (and if so, for which triggers)? And are there effects based on linear order in processing, or are they due to the projection mechanism? I present recent results from a picture matching task in the covered box paradigm on ‘again’ that suggest that a) projection is non-conditional from both disjuncts, b) that local accommodation is in principle possible even with a ‘hard’ trigger such as ‘again’, and c) that access to local accommodation can be primed by preceding experimental blocks that force this interpretation. Two visual world eye tracking studies, on ‘stop’ in the first disjunct and ‘continue’ in the second disjunct, furthermore provide evidence that non-conditional global interpretations are at play in online processing. The study on the second disjunct also provides evidence that responses that are inconsistent with a non-conditional global interpretations are slower than ones that are, in line with previous findings in the literature that local-accommodation based responses come with a slow down in reaction times.