![]() On the explanatory power of dynamic semantics. Incremental versus symmetric accounts of presupposition projection: An experimental approach. Manuscript, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris and MIT.Ĭhemla, E., & Schlenker, P. Similarity: Towards a unified account of scalar implicatures, free choice permission and presupposition projection. Our results also have broader implications for the study of presupposition: we find important differences in the verdicts of acceptability versus inference tasks in testing for projected content, which has both methodological ramifications for the question of how to distinguish presupposed content, and theoretical repercussions for understanding the nature of projection and presuppositions more generally.Ĭhemla, E. , 2009 a.o.), and pave the way for the investigation of further questions about the nature of this asymmetry and presupposition projection more generally. These results suggest that presupposition filtering across conjunction is asymmetric, contra suggestions in the recent literature (Schlenker in Theor Linguist 34(3):157–212, 2008a. In our results, we find strong evidence for left-to-right filtering across conjunctions, but no evidence for right-to-left filtering-even when right-to-left filtering would, if available, rescue an otherwise unacceptable sentence. ) and Schwarz (in: Schwarz (ed) Experimental perspectives on presuppositions, Springer, Cham, 2015), using inference and acceptability tasks, which aim to control for both of these potential confounds. ![]() We report on a series of experiments, building on previous work by Chemla and Schlenker (Nat Lang Semant 20(2):177–226, 2012. As a number of authors have recently pointed out, however, the evidence which has typically been used to support this conclusion is muddied by independent issues concerning redundancy additional concerns have to do with the possibility of local accommodation. ![]() It also bears on broader issues concerning the source of asymmetries observed in natural language: are these simply rooted in superficial asymmetries of language use (language use happens in time, which we experience as fundamentally asymmetric) or are they, at least in part, directly encoded in linguistic knowledge and representations? In this paper we aim to make progress on these questions by exploring presupposition projection across conjunction, which has traditionally been taken as a central piece of evidence that presupposition filtering is asymmetric in general. ![]() We also suggest that local contexts can, at some cost, be computed symmetrically, taking into account information about all of S (except E) this leads to gradient predictions, whose assessment is left for future research.Is the mechanism behind presupposition projection and filtering fundamentally asymmetric or symmetric? This is a foundational question for the theory of presupposition which has been at the centre of attention in recent literature (Schlenker in Theor Linguist 38(3):287–316, 2008b. This version of the theory can be shown to be nearly equivalent to the dynamic theory of Heim 1983 - but unlike the latter, it is entirely predictive. To match the results of dynamic semantics, local contexts must be computed incrementally, using only information about the expressions that precede E. To circumvent the problem, we revise two assumptions of the dynamic approach: we take the update process to be derivative from a classical, non-dynamic semantics - which obviates the need for dynamic lexical entries and we deny that a local context encodes what the speech act participants 'take for granted.' Instead, we take the local context of an expression E in a sentence S to be the smallest domain that one may restrict attention to when assessing E without jeopardizing the truth conditions of S. But how is a local context derived from the global one? Extant dynamic analyses must specify in the lexical entry of any operator what its 'Context Change Potential' is, and for this very reason they fail to be sufficiently explanatory. The dynamic approach posits that a presupposition must be satisfied in its local context.
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