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Journal of Semantics Advance Access published online on September 3, 2007
Journal of Semantics, doi:10.1093/jos/ffm011
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Processing Presupposed Content

Florian Schwarz

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Correspondence: FLORIAN SCHWARZ, Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 226 South College, 150 Hicks Way, Amherst MA 01003, USA, e-mail: florian{at}linguist.umass.edu


  Abstract

This paper presents three experimental studies investigating the processing of presupposed content. The first two experiments employ the German additive particle auch ‘too’, and the third uses English also. In experiment 1, participants were given a questionnaire containing biclausal, ambiguous sentences containing auch. The presupposition introduced by auch was only satisfied on one of the two readings, which 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. Experiment 2 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. Experiment 3 followed up a number of issues that arose from experiment 2 and confirmed the results found there. These 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 the semantic analysis of auch/also and dynamic accounts of presuppositions as well as for theories of semantic processing are discussed.

Received for publication 4 March 2006. Revision received 9 February 2007. Accepted for publication 14 June 2007.


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