Abstract
This paper investigates the processing and accommodation of the presuppositions triggered by wieder (‘again’). We conducted a word by word self-paced reading experiment where we presented sentences containing wieder in a context which furnished the relevant presupposition and one which did not. We then additionally asked questions to determine whether people accommodate the presupposition of wieder when it is not explicitly given in the context. The results show that effects due to a missing presupposition arise very early during reading and that there is no accommodation of the presupposition introduced by wieder. On the basis of this, we introduce the interpretation principle minimize accommodation and discuss what implications this brings about for other presupposition triggers. Another interesting result is a late increase in reading times in the condition which verifies the presupposition. We argue that this is due to the referential nature of wieder.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Slashes indicate the strings of words that were presented together at the same time.
- 2.
We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
- 3.
The tree in (34) shows that the first temporal argument of again is a free pronoun. This is what we mean when we say that t’ remains free.
- 4.
After finishing this paper it came to our attention that a similar division has already been proposed in Glanzberg (2005). He presents his arguments in an update semantic framework, but the idea is very similar at heart.
- 5.
For ease of presentation, we are leaving out the world variables in this derivation. They are still important to capture the meaning of presuppositions, of course.
- 6.
Slashes indicate the regions of interest (ROIs).
References
Altmann, G., and M. Steedman. 1988. Interaction with context during sentence processing. Cognition 30:191–238.
Bates, D. M. 2005. Fitting linear mixed models in r. R News 5:27–30.
Beaver, D., and H. Zeevat. 2008. Towards a general theory of presupposition and accommodation. The University of Texas at Austin and University of Amsterdam.
Beck, S. 2007. Quantifier dependent readings of anaphoric presuppositions. In Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, ed. U. Sauerland and P. Stateva. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Burkhardt, P. 2006. Inferential bridging relations reveal distinct neural mechanisms: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Brain and Language 98:159–168.
Dickey, M. W. 2000. The Processing of tense: Psycholinguistic studies on the interpretation of tense and temporal relations. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Domaneschi, F., E. Carrea, C. Penco, and A. Greco. 2013. [AQ1]The cognitive load of presupposition triggers: Mandatory and optional repairs in presupposition failure. Language and Cognitive Processes 29(1):136–146.
Frazier, L. 1978. Theories of sentence processing. In Modularity in knowledge representation and natural language processing, ed. J. Garfield, 493–522. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Frazier, L., and C. Clifton. 2000. On bound variable interpretations: The LF-only hypothesis. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 29:125–139.
Garrod, S., and A. J. Sanford. 1994. Resolving sentences in a discourse context: How discourse representation affects language understanding. In \textitHandbook of psycholinguistics, ed. M. A. Gernsbacher, 675–698. San Diego: Academic Press.
Garrod, S., and M. Terras. 2000. The contribution of lexical and situational knowledge to resolving discourse roles: Bonding and resolution. Journal of Memory and Language 42:526–544.
Glanzberg, M. 2005. Presuppositions, truth values and expressing propositions. In Contextualism in philosophy: Knowledge, meaning, and truth, chapter Glanzberg, Michael, ed. G. Preyer and G. Peter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heim, I. 1990. Presupposition projection. In Reader for the Nijmegen workshop on presupposition, lexical meaning, and discourse processes, ed. R. van der Sandt. University of Nijmegen.
Heim, I., and A. Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in generative grammar, Volume 13 of Blackwell textbooks in linguistics. Malden: Blackwell.
Inhoff, A. W. 1985. The effect of factivity on lexical retrieval and postlexical process during eye fixations in reading. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 14 (14): 45–57.
Kamp, H., and A. Rossdeutscher. 1994. Drs-construction and lexically driven inference. Theoretical Linguistics 20:165–235.
Koornneef, A. W. 2008. Eye-catching anaphora. Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht.
Kripke, S. 2009. Presupposition and anaphora: Remarks on the formulation of the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry 40:367–386. (Manuscript, Princeton University).
Moulton, K. 2007. Small antecedents: Syntax or pragmatics? In Proceedings of NELS 37, ed. E. Elfner, and M. Walkow. Amherst: GLSA Publications.
Sanford, A., S. Garrod, A. Lucas, and R. Henderson. 1983. Pronouns without explicit antecedents? Journal of Semantics 2:303–318.
Schwarz, F. 2007. Processing presupposed content. Journal of Semantics 24:373–416.
Simons, M. 2001. On the conversational basis of some presuppositions. In Proceedings of semantics and linguistics theory 11, ed. R. Hasting, B. Jackson, and Z. Zvolensky. Ithaca: CLC Publications.
Soames, S. 1982. How presuppositions are inherited: A solution to the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry 13:483–545.
Stalnaker, R. 1973. Presuppositions. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2: 447–457.
Stalnaker, R. 1974. Pragmatic presuppositions. In Semantics and Philosophy, ed. M. Munitz and P. Unger, 197–214. New York: New York University Press.
Sturt, P. 2003. The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and Language 48:542–562.
van Berkum, J. J. A., C. M. Brown, and P. Hagoort. 1999. Early referential context effects in sentence processing: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Memory and Language 41 (2): 147–182.
van Berkum, J. J. A., C. M. Brown, P. Hagoort, and P. Zwitserlood. 2003. Event-related brain potentials reflect discourse-referential ambiguity in spoken language comprehension. Psychophysiology 40:235–248.
van der Sandt, R., and J. Huitink. 2003. Again. In Proceedings of the 14th Amsterdam colloquium, ed. P. Dekker and R. van Rooij, 181–186. Amsterdam: ILLC.
von Fintel, K. 2003. Pragmatics: Notes on presupposition. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Zeevat, H. 2002. Explaining presupposition triggers. In Information sharing, ed. K. van Deemter and R. Kibble, 61–87. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Zeevat, H. 2004. Particles: Presupposition triggers, context markers or speech act markers. In \textitOptimality theory and pragmatics, ed. R. Blutner and H. Zeevat, 91–111. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tiemann, S., Kirsten, M., Beck, S., Hertrich, I., Rolke, B. (2015). Presupposition Processing and Accommodation: An Experiment on wieder (‘again’) and Consequences for Other Triggers. 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_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07980-6_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07979-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07980-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)