Abstract
Presuppositions are vital for language comprehension, but little remains known about how they are processed. Using eye tracking in reading, we investigated two issues based on German wieder (’again’). First, we looked at the time course of presupposition processing by testing for processing costs of unsupported presuppositions. Secondly, we tested whether embedding wieder under negation affected a potential mismatch effect. Presupposition-induced effects showed up immediately after wieder, but only in the unembedded context, suggesting that embedding interferes with the detection of the mismatch. However, judgments in a follow-up rating study indicate that a mismatch is perceived in both the embedded and unembedded conditions when the PSP is not supported by the context. Taken together, these results suggest that detection of the mismatch under embedding is delayed in processing.
This work was supported by EURO-XPRAG (ESF) and SFB 833 (DFG).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abusch, D.: Presupposition Triggering from Alternatives. Journal of Semantics 27, 37–80 (2009)
Bates, D.M., Sarkar, D.: lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes, R package version 0.99875-6 (2007)
Bates, D.M.: Fitting linear mixed models in R. R News 5, 27–30 (2005)
Baayen, R.H., Davidson, D.J., Bates, D.M.: Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 390–412 (2008)
Beaver, D.I., Geurts, B.: Presupposition. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/presupposition/
Bott, L., Noveck, I.A.: Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language 51, 437–457 (2004)
Chemla, E., Bott, L.: Processing Presuppositions: Dynamic Semantics vs. Pragmatic Enrichment. Cardiff University, IJN, LSCP (2010) (manuscript)
Chemla, E.: Presuppositions of Quantified Sentences: Experimental Data. Natural Language Semantics 17, 299–340 (2009)
Heim, I., Kratzer, A.: Semantics in Generative Grammar (1998)
Heim, I.: Presupposition Projection. Reader for the Nijmegen Workshop on Presupposition, Lexical Meaning, and Discourse Processes (1990)
Heim, I.: The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1982)
Kamp, H.: A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation. Formal Methods in the Study of Language, 277–322 (1981)
Rayner, K.: Eye Movements in Reading and Information Processing: 20 Years of Research. Psychological 124, 372–422 (1998)
van der Sandt, R.: Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution. Journal of Semantics 9, 333–377 (1992)
van der Sandt, R., Geurts, B.: Presupposition, Anaphora, and Lexical Content. In: Herzog, O., Rollinger, C.-R. (eds.) LILOG 1991. LNCS, vol. 546, pp. 259–296. Springer, Heidelberg (1991)
Schwarz, F.: Processing Presupposed Content. Journal of Semantics 24, 373–416 (2007)
Schlenker, P.: Presuppositions and Local Contexts. Mind 119(474), 377–391 (2010)
Schlenker, P.: Local Contexts. Semantics & Pragmatics 2, 1–78 (2009)
Simons, M.: On the Conversational Basis of Some Presuppositions. In: Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory 11 (2001)
Stalnaker, R.: Presuppositions. Journal of Phillosophical Logic 2, 447–457 (1973)
Tiemann, S., Schmid, M., Bade, N., Rolke, B., Hertrich, I., Ackermann, H., Knapp, J., Beck, S.: Psycholinguistic Evidence for Presuppositions: On-line and Off-line Data. Sinn und Bedeutung 15. In: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik, pp. 581–597 (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Schwarz, F., Tiemann, S. (2012). Presupposition Processing – The Case of German wieder . In: Aloni, M., Kimmelman, V., Roelofsen, F., Sassoon, G.W., Schulz, K., Westera, M. (eds) Logic, Language and Meaning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7218. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31481-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31482-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)