Speaker: Haoming Li (MIT)
Title: Assertion and presupposition of change-of-state verbs across different aspects
Time: Wednesday, March 11th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Title: Assertion and presupposition of change-of-state verbs across different aspects
Time: Wednesday, March 11th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Sudo (2012); Zehr & Schwarz (2018), among others, have drawn attention to the different discourse and projection behaviors of presuppositions that are entailed by the assertion (e.g., the prior negative state presupposition of stop) versus those that are non-entailed by the assertion (e.g., the gender presupposition of herself). Doron, Fox, & Wehbe (2025) note that two dimensional systems of assertion and presupposition specification are too unconstrained and propose to retrieve the assertion of sentences from trivalent propositions via an algorithm that takes into account the deletability of the presupposition triggers. This talk presents new data on the non-uniform presuppositional behavior of certain change-of-state verbs in different aspects (present perfect and simple past) which calls for the system in DF&W, where the same presupposition trigger can in principle be variably deletable or non-deletable depending on the semantic context, and which motivates lexical decomposition approaches to change-of-state verbs.