Abstract
The current study investigates presupposition-satisfying dependencies from the point of view of discourse processing. Using the presupposition trigger also as a case study, I ask to what extent the distance spanned by the trigger and the prior discourse content that satisfies the presupposition of also influences comprehenders’ interpretation of the discourse—specifically, whether comprehenders have a bias toward satisfying presuppositions using material in the discourse that is closer rather than more distant.
Two offline experiments and one Visual World eye-tracking experiment provide evidence in favor of a locality bias in presupposition satisfaction. The findings support sensitivity to both linear distance and distance in terms of hierarchically structured discourse representations, consistent with an interpretation system that tracks both structure-insensitive information about discourse mention, and structured representations of larger discourse units.
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Notes
- 1.
1Assume the context restricts the set of possible alternatives to just the salient ones, where salient can be understood as likely to be inferred by the addressee (see e.g. Kim (2012)).
- 2.
See also Hintikka (1976); Lewis (1979) for early work on dialogue/discourse-based approaches to meaning.
- 3.
See Sanders et al. (1992, 1993) for a taxonomy of coherence relations in terms of a small set of cognitive primitives, such as causality.
- 4.
This is primarily in reference to the coherence relations described in Hobbs (1979) and Kehler (2002). Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson 1988) features both a large inventory of relations and the possibility of forming dependencies between non-atomic discourse constituents, producing hierarchical discourse structures.
- 5.
For related studies on discourse effects in clause-level processing, see Millis and Just(1994); van Berkum et al. (1999); Roland et al. (2008); Rohde et al. (2011).
- 6.
For purposes of this study, I make the simplifying assumptions that sentences are atomic discourse units—i.e. they are not further decomposed, and that they are related to each other by a finite set of discourse connectives, which often but not always correspond to natural language connectives.
- 7.
Note that because the subject of the final sentence in (3) is a pronoun, it is incompatible with the prosodic pattern associated with subject focus. This is not the case for the discourses used in Experiment 2 (4), only responses compatible with direct object focus were available in that experiment.
- 8.
In order to minimize differences in complexity among display quadrants, each quadrant contained 6–8 objects, regardless of the number of object types present. For example, a subset quadrant would have 6–8 objects of the same type (e.g. apples), while a superset quadrant might have two of each of four object types (e.g. carrots, apples, bread, nectarines).
- 9.
The rightmost bars in Fig. 14 also show a numerical advantage for response times in the Competition condition when the structured interpretation was chosen, compared to when the linear interpretation was chosen.
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Kim, C. (2015). Presupposition Satisfaction, Locality and Discourse Constituency. 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_5
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