Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Ling Lunch 12/10 - Florian Schwarz

Speaker: Florian Schwarz(UPenn)
Title: Towards a Typology of Presupposition Triggers – Experimental Explorations
Time: Thursday, December 10th, 12:30-1:45pm
Place: 32-D461

Much recent work on presuppositions has argued for the need to distinguish different classes of presupposition triggers, perhaps most prominently in terms of the Hard vs. Soft distinction (Abusch 2002, 2010). Abusch, and more recently Romoli (2012, 2014), analyze the latter as a type of implicature. I present a summary of experimental investigations suggesting that soft triggers behave differently from implicatures, which poses a serious challenge for this line of analysis. At the same time, another set of experimental results suggests that differences between presupposition triggers are real, which raises the question of how to best capture these contrasts in a different way. I explore the possibility of explaining the relevant effects by distinguishing triggers in terms of whether or not they contribute their presupposition to the entailed content as well (Sudo 2012; cf. also Tonhauser et al. 2013’s notion of ‘obligatory local effects’), and present some initial experimental explorations that lend support to this approach.