Presuppositons in processing : a case study of German "auch"

  • This paper presents two experimental studies investigating the processing of presupposed content. Both studies employ the German additive particle auch (too). In the first study, participants were given a questionnaire containing bi-clausal, ambiguous sentences with 'auch' in the second clause. The presupposition introduced by auch was only satisfied on one of the two readings of the sentence, and this reading corresponded to a syntactically dispreferred parse of the sentence. The prospect of having the auch-presupposition satisfied made participants choose this syntactically dispreferred reading more frequently than in a control condition. The second study used the self-paced-reading paradigm and compared the reading times on clauses containing auch, which differed in whether the presupposition of auch was satisfied or not. Participants read the clause more slowly when the presupposition was not satisfied. It is argued that the two studies show that presuppositions play an important role in online sentence comprehension and affect the choice of syntactic analysis. Some theoretical implications of these findings for semantic theory and dynamic accounts of presuppositions as well as for theories of semantic processing are discussed.

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Metadaten
Author:Florian Schwarz
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-309814
URL:http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/188.html
ISSN:1435-9588
ISSN:0947-7055
Parent Title (English):Proceedings of the Sinn und Bedeutung 10 : 10th annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Semantik, October 13 - 15, 2005, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin; ZASPil Vol. 44
Publisher:Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung
Place of publication:Berlin
Document Type:Part of a Book
Language:English
Year of Completion:2006
Year of first Publication:2006
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2013/11/14
GND Keyword:Sprachverarbeitung; Sprachverstehen; Lexikologie; Formale Semantik; Präsupposition; Deutsch
Volume:44
Page Number:15
First Page:301
Last Page:315
HeBIS-PPN:378088807
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 43 Deutsch, germanische Sprachen allgemein / 430 Germanische Sprachen; Deutsch
Sammlungen:Germanistik / GiNDok
Linguistik
BDSL-Klassifikation:02.00.00 Deutsche Sprachwissenschaft (in Auswahl) / BDSL-Klassifikation: 02.00.00 Deutsche Sprachwissenschaft > 02.02.00 Studien
Linguistik-Klassifikation:Linguistik-Klassifikation: Semantik / Semantics
Linguistik-Klassifikation: Psycholinguistik/Kognitive Linguistik / Psycholinguistics/Cognitive linguistics
Linguistik-Klassifikation: Lexikologie/Etymologie / Lexicology/Etymology
Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte:ZAS papers in linguistics : ZASPiL / ZASPiL 44 = Proceedings of the Sinn und Bedeutung 10
:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-306872
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht