Florian Schwarz

In addition to referential uses, pronouns can have covarying interpretations, i.e., exhibit the behavior of a bound variable. The grammatical mechanism(s) behind such readings have been subject to longstanding debates: Some authors argue for a fairly flexible but unified semantic mechanism that is not tied closely to syntactic configurations. Others distinguish a core class of bona fidebinding with tight syntactic constraints from other mechanisms that give rise to ultimately parallel effects, but do so more indirectly. Psycholinguistic work has started to uncover the processing mechanisms involved in evaluating dependencies between covarying pronouns and (candidate) antecedents. Moulton and Han (2018) leverage the processing perspective to try to shed light on the theoretical question of what grammatical mechanism is at play for a given covarying pronoun. They argue that so-called Gender Mismatch Effects only arise for cases of bona fide binding, supporting the existence of distinct grammatical mechanisms. However, Kush and Eik (2019), looking at another construction involving the relevant other covariation mechanisms, do find Gender Mismatch Effects. These authors suggest that various contextual factors can make a covarying interpretation harder to obtain, and they propose adjustments to Moulton and Han’s stimuli that they think should lead to fast Gender Mismatch Effects even when no bona fide binding is involved. A series of self-paced reading experiments replicate the results from Moulton and Han, and then extend the paradigm to variations along the lines suggested by Kush and Eik. The adjustment of contextual factors indeed results in Gender Mismatch Effects for both environments. We discuss how the processing evidence informs the theoretical issues.

In this paper, we address the following question: how do comprehenders reason about the persona embodied by the speaker to determine the referential meaning of numerical expressions such as “The price is $200”?Using a picture selection task, we show that descriptions uttered by speakers embodying a Nerdy persona, indexically associated with highly precise speech, are interpreted more precisely than those uttered by speakers embodying a Chill persona, indexically associated with imprecise speech. These findings contribute to building a more integrative perspective between the socio-indexical and the referential domain of signification, highlighting comprehenders’ social perception of the speaker as a crucial element informing pragmatic reasoning, and meaning interpretation more broadly.

In natural language, we encounter various sentence types that, under certain circumstances, are evaluated as neither true nor false. For instance, it is intuitively difficult to assess the truth value of a sentence whose presupposition is not satisfied in the context. A common theoretical approach is to characterize the status of such sentences with a third value of one kind or another. In this chapter, we consider children’s acquisition of four linguistic phenomena that can give rise to ‘gappy’ judgments that correspond neither to True nor False: scalar implicature, presupposition, homogeneity, and vagueness. We discuss how young children’s interpretations of such sentences can provide insight into how these phenomena should be treated within semantic theories.

One central question in presupposition theory concerns the effect of using a presupposition trigger in a context where its presupposition is not supported. We test the predictions of recent accounts based on the idea that presuppositions of certain triggers, such as again, can be ignored entirely in such circumstances. We sketch two possible alternative accounts wherein presuppositions cannot be ignored and provide experimental results suggesting that presupposed content is fully considered for all triggers across contexts. Specifically, we find that presupposition accommodation does takes place when not strictly necessary for the task at hand. We also find some indications of differences between triggers, which are consistent with our alternative accounts.

Is the basic mechanism behind presupposition projection fundamentally asymmetricor symmetric? This is a basic question for the theory of presupposition, and alsobears on broader issues concerning the source of asymmetries observed in naturallanguage: are these simply rooted in superficial asymmetries of language use—language use unfolds in time, which we experience as fundamentally asymmetric—or can they be, at least in part, directly referenced in linguistic knowledge andrepresentations? In this paper we aim to make progress on these questions byexploring presupposition projection across conjunction, which has typically beentaken as a central piece of evidence that presupposition projection is asymmetric.As a number of authors have recently pointed out, however, whether or not thisconclusion is warranted is not clear once we take into account independent issues ofredundancy. Building on previous work by Chemla & Schlenker (2012) and Schwarz(2015), we approach this question experimentally by using an inference task whichcontrols for redundancy and presupposition suspension. We find strong evidence forleft-to-right filtering across conjunctions, but no evidence for right-to-left filtering,suggesting that, at least as a default, presupposition projection across conjunction isindeed asymmetric.

A central aspect of language comprehension is that hearers integrate incoming linguistic content both with the rest of the current sentence and the larger discourse context. Presuppositions crucially interact with both intra- and inter-sentential context in intricate ways, which makes their study especially useful in this regard. We present a series of experiments investigating the time-course of interpreting presuppositions in online comprehension and the impact that so-called presupposition projection has on this in cases where presuppositions appear in embedded environments. We find immediate delays in eye tracking reading times when the presupposition of German wieder (‘again’) is not supported by the context, but only for unembedded occurrences of wieder. Further evidence from a rating experiment and a stops-making-sense study supports our interpretation of this result to the effect that global presuppositions of embedded presupposition triggers are not immediately available in processing. A second reading time experiment explores the effects of embedding further by providing presuppositional support in different locations in contexts with a more complex structure involving conditionals. We find longer reading times when the support is more distant, measured in terms of the number of projection steps posited by Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). Altogether, the results suggest that presupposition projection is a cognitively effortful process, and are thus consistent with theoretical accounts that reflect this in terms of the complexity of the representations involved in the different types of contexts, while other accounts that are more neutral in this regard need to be supplemented by additional assumptions or alternative explanations for the observed effects. On the more general level of discourse processing models, these results suggest that there is even more structure relevant to cognitive processes at a level between the surface representation and the purely semantic level (e.g. the commonly assumed level of a text-base) than previously assumed.

Recent years have seen a surge of experimental approaches to the study of natural language meaning, both to obtain solid data on subtle phenomena that are hard to assess through introspection and to understand how abstract characterizations of linguistic knowledge relate to real-time cognitive processes in language comprehension. This article reviews research in one of the most recent areas to see extensive experimental investigations, namely presupposition and presupposition projection. Presuppositions are at the very nexus of linguistically encoded content and contextual information, as they relate directly to the discourse context but also interact in intricate ways with their intra-sentential linguistic environment. They are thus extremely suitable for investigations of the interplay of linguistic and more domain-general processes in language comprehension, as well as for experimental investigations of subtle theoretical phenomena.

One central debate in the analysis of definite descriptions concerns the truth-value of sentences where there is no entity that meets the description in the definite. Classical Russellian accounts predict them to be plain false, whereas presuppositional accounts predict them to be infelicitous. Recent discussions have homed in on the factors that affect actual judgment behaviour in relation to the underlying status posited by different accounts. This article presents experimental evidence for a presuppositional view based on response times for judging statements with non-referring definites to be ‘false’, which were longer relative to control statements where existence was asserted. I discuss the theoretical implications of these results, as well as of other findings from the literature, arguing that they support a presuppositional view of definites that sees the existence presupposition as conventionally encoded. The article also makes a methodological contribution, as systematic evidence on speakers' judgments in these cases turns out to be hard to come by. Finally, the results inform the more general issue of the online processes involved in the interpretation of presupposed, as opposed to asserted, content.