DOI:10.30842/alp23065737201248273
Zevakhina Natalia A., Rodina Maria A.
Presupposition diversity: Soft and hard presupposition triggers in
(non-)embedded contexts. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana.
2024. 20(1): 248–273.
The paper provides psycholinguistic evidence that the
distinction between soft and hard presupposition triggers is
sensitive to clauses embedded under attitude, reporting, and
emotive verbs. The paper argues that these contexts represent yet
another type of context along with Family of Sentences (antecedent
of conditional, modal assertion, and yes/no question) that
facilitate presupposition projection of hard triggers to a greater
extent than that of soft triggers. The reason behind this lies in
the distinction between global vs. local context of presupposition
projection: hard triggers are globally projected, whereas soft
triggers are either globally or locally projected. The experiment
reported in the paper was designed as a verification task, that is,
the participants were presented with utterances followed by
questions and were asked to evaluate the information conveyed by
the questions according to the information conveyed by the
utterances. The information in the questions violated the
presupposition conveyed by the utterances. The following six
Russian presupposition triggers were experimentally tested: the
adverbs opyat and snova ‘again’, the particle
tozhe ‘too’ (hard triggers), the attitude verbs
uznat ‘find out’, zabyt ‘forget’ and the
aspectual verb zakonсhit ‘finish’ (soft triggers). The
triggers took positions in the main, in the embedded clause, or in
both. We used two experimental lists such that one of them targeted
a trigger in the main clause, and the other one targeted a trigger
in the embedded clause. The paper reveals that presupposition
projection is not a default linguistic process since it is
compatible with fallacies in pragmatic reasoning even for hard
triggers in main clause contexts. Also, for the first time, the
paper investigates combinations of soft and hard triggers in main
and embedded contexts and compares them to single soft and hard
triggers, thus bringing presupposition projection to new
frontiers.
Keywords
presupposition, presupposition triggers, soft,
hard, embedded
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