Download or read book The Role of Presupposition in the Comprehension of Sentences in Context written by Jennifer Langford and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Role of Presupposed and Focal Information in Integrating Sentences written by Frank R. Yekovich and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two experiments explored the linguistic processes that underlie integration of the meaning of one sentence with the meaning of another. The authors propose that the linguistic markings of both a referring anaphor and the antecedent to which it refers are important for comprehension. The integrating process involves identifying a primary antecedent from a context sentence and relating an approxiately marked anaphor from the target sentence back to the antecedent. The primary antecedent is ideally marked as focal (new information) in the context sentence, whereas the anaphor is linguistically presupposed (old information) in the target sentence. Two comprehensive-time experiments tested this idea. Subjects read sentence pairs in which the linguistic markings of a repeated noun phrase varied across the sentences. Context sentences incorporated the noun phrase as either presupposed (P) or focal (F), and the target repetition appeared as either presupposed (P) or focal (F). Comprehension time was fastest for FP combinations, intermediate for FF and PP pairs, and slowest for PF combinations. These results obtained when the proximity of the repeated phrase was controlled (Experiment I) and also when target sentences were in both active and passive voices (Experiment II). This report is intended for psychologists interested in linguistics. (Author).

Download or read book Presuppositions and Discourse Essays Offered to Hans Kamp written by Rainer Bauerle and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-03-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So it is hardly a decade ago that presupposition theory has been cast into a promising theoretical form. And as this provided an inspiring starting point for further research, we thought that, at the turn of the century, the time had come to discuss what the new theory had taught us and which promising further perspectives had been opened up. This was the motivation behind the conference on "Presupposition" which we convened in Stuttgart in October 2000, and which gave rise to the papers collected in this volume. The conference was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which we gratefully acknowledge. Undoubtedly, presupposition theory is a major chapter in the success story of dynamic semantics. A conference on the topic thus also seemed to us the ideal birthday present for one of the founding fathers of dynamic semantics, our teacher and friend Hans Kamp, on his 60th birthday. To him we dedicate the volume as an expression of our gratitude for his untiring effort to make us understand.

Download or read book Context and Presupposition written by Rob A. van der Sandt and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, which has been written for linguists and philosophers working in the field of semantics, deals with presupposition and its dependence on context.

Download or read book The Role of Presuppositions in Creating and Understanding Sentences written by Thomas Taysum Hewett and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions written by Florian Schwarz and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-09-12 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together some of the most recent developments in the field of experimental pragmatics, specifically empirical approaches to theoretical issues in presupposition theory. It includes studies of the online processing of presupposed content; investigations of the interpretive properties of presuppositions in various linguistic contexts; comparative perspectives relative to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and implicatures; cross-linguistic comparisons of presupposition triggers; and perspectives from language acquisition. Taken together, these novel contributions provide a snapshot of state-of-the art developments in this area and will serve as a point of reference for numerous emerging avenues of future work. It makes for an ideal set of readings for advanced university courses on experimental studies of meaning and is a must-read for anyone interested in experimental research on meaning in natural language.

Download or read book Presupposition and Implicature in Compositional Semantics written by Uli Sauerland and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-06-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, the contributors investigate three mental mechanisms, widely assumed to underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation. This volume brings together experts from semantics and pragmatics to bring forward the study of interconnections between these three mechanisms. The contributions develop new insights into important empirical phenomena; for example, approximation, free choice, accommodation, and exhaustivity effects.

Download or read book The Role of Presupposed and Focal Information in Integrating Sentences written by Frank R. Yekovich and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two experiments explored the linguistic processes that underlie integration of the meaning of one sentence with the meaning of another. The authors propose that the linguistic markings of both a referring anaphor and the antecedent to which it refers are important for comprehension. The integrating process involves identifying a primary antecedent from a context sentence and relating an approxiately marked anaphor from the target sentence back to the antecedent. The primary antecedent is ideally marked as focal (new information) in the context sentence, whereas the anaphor is linguistically presupposed (old information) in the target sentence. Two comprehensive-time experiments tested this idea. Subjects read sentence pairs in which the linguistic markings of a repeated noun phrase varied across the sentences. Context sentences incorporated the noun phrase as either presupposed (P) or focal (F), and the target repetition appeared as either presupposed (P) or focal (F). Comprehension time was fastest for FP combinations, intermediate for FF and PP pairs, and slowest for PF combinations. These results obtained when the proximity of the repeated phrase was controlled (Experiment I) and also when target sentences were in both active and passive voices (Experiment II). This report is intended for psychologists interested in linguistics. (Author).

Download or read book Presuppositions in Context written by Athulya Aravind (Ph. D.) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is about the acquisition of presupposition. The specific focus is on the interplay between presuppositional content as hardwired in the semantics of particular expressions and the conversational contexts in which utterances containing those expressions may be used. A series of behavioral experiments examine what children in the preschool age range know about the pragmatic principles governing presupposition, and how they come to acquire this knowledge. The dissertation is organized into two thematic halves. The first half investigates the conditions that govern when presupposing something is appropriate, hence allow for the use of a presupposition triggering expression. Specifically, I ask: do young children know the common ground requirement - the formal requirement that presuppositions be previously established common knowledge - and do they know when and how this requirement can be violated? Two sets of experiments, using two presupposition-carrying expressions with importantly divergent properties (too and the), reveal that children, like adults, generate a default expectation that a presuppositional sentence be uttered to a listener who already takes for granted the presupposition. However, they hold onto this expectation even in circumstances where adult speakers do not. Unlike adults, children do not expect that an otherwise 'neutral' listener might accommodate a speaker's informative presupposition. Together, these findings point to a developmental path where the formal requirement - that presuppositions be presuppositions - is acquired before an understanding that the rule can be bent and how. The second half examines the conditions that make marking of presuppositions obligatory, hence require the use of a presupposition triggering expression. Are children sensitive to Maximize Presupposition! (Heim 1991) as a principle governing competition and utterance choice? The ability to deploy Maximize Presupposition! in an adult-like way shows a more protracted developmental trajectory. Moreover, children's ability to rule out presuppositionally weaker sentences seems to vary across competition environments. Taking the non-uniformity in development as signaling non-uniformity in the underlying phenomena, I develop an alternative account for a pair of expressions commonly thought to compete for Maximize Presupposition!: another vs. a. Ultimately, I suggest that Maximize Presupposition! is one of several pragmatic principles that lead to competition and selection of structures imposing the strongest contextual requirement. Children have command of some of these conditions, but not others. The acquisition trajectories are modulated by various factors, including the type of requirement imposed on the context (e.g. that some proposition is salient vs. accepted common belief) and the types of knowledge that are pre-requisites (e.g. knowledge of idiosyncratic properties of the lexicon).

Download or read book Presuppositions in Context written by Athulya Aravind and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is about the acquisition of presupposition. The specific focus is on the interplay between presuppositional content as hardwired in the semantics of particular expressions and the conversational contexts in which utterances containing those expressions may be used. A series of behavioral experiments examine what children in the preschool age range know about the pragmatic principles governing presupposition, and how they come to acquire this knowledge. The dissertation is organized into two thematic halves. The first half investigates the conditions that govern when presupposing something is appropriate, hence allow for the use of a presupposition triggering expression. Specifically, I ask: do young children know the common ground requirement - the formal requirement that presuppositions be previously established common knowledge - and do they know when and how this requirement can be violated? Two sets of experiments, using two presupposition-carrying expressions with importantly divergent properties (too and the), reveal that children, like adults, generate a default expectation that a presuppositional sentence be uttered to a listener who already takes for granted the presupposition. However, they hold onto this expectation even in circumstances where adult speakers do not. Unlike adults, children do not expect that an otherwise 'neutral' listener might accommodate a speaker's informative presupposition. Together, these findings point to a developmental path where the formal requirement - that presuppositions be presuppositions - is acquired before an understanding that the rule can be bent and how. The second half examines the conditions that make marking of presuppositions obligatory, hence require the use of a presupposition triggering expression. Are children sensitive to Maximize Presupposition! (Heim 1991) as a principle governing competition and utterance choice? The ability to deploy Maximize Presupposition! in an adult-like way shows a more protracted developmental trajectory. Moreover, children's ability to rule out presuppositionally weaker sentences seems to vary across competition environments. Taking the non-uniformity in development as signaling non-uniformity in the underlying phenomena, I develop an alternative account for a pair of expressions commonly thought to compete for Maximize Presupposition!: another vs. a. Ultimately, I suggest that Maximize Presupposition! is one of several pragmatic principles that lead to competition and selection of structures imposing the strongest contextual requirement. Children have command of some of these conditions, but not others. The acquisition trajectories are modulated by various factors, including the type of requirement imposed on the context (e.g. that some proposition is salient vs. accepted common belief) and the types of knowledge that are pre-requisites (e.g. knowledge of idiosyncratic properties of the lexicon).

Download or read book Presuppositions and Cognitive Processes written by Filippo Domaneschi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-29 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book breaks new ground towards an understanding of the mental processes involved in presupposition, the comprehension of information taken for granted. Various psycholinguistic experiments are discussed to support the idea that involved in ordinary language comprehension are complex and demanding cognitive processes. The author demonstrates that these processes exist not only at the explicit level of an utterance but also at a deeper level of computing, where the background information taken for granted as already known and shared between interlocutors is processed. The author shows that experimental research can suggest new theoretical models for presupposition, thus this book will be of interest to researchers and students of psycholinguistics, the philosophy of language and experimental pragmatics.

Download or read book On Sentence Interpretation written by Lyn Frazier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At present there exists no empirically-motivated theory of how perceivers assign a grammatically-permissible interpretation to a sentence. Implicit in many investigations of language comprehension is the idea that each constituent of a sentence is interpreted by the perceiver at the earliest conceivable point, using all potentially relevant sources of information. A variety of counter examples are presented to argue against this implicit theory of sentence interpretation. It is argued that an explicit alternative theory is needed to specify which decisions are made at which points during interpretive processing and to spell out the principles governing the processor's preferred choice at points of ambiguity or uncertainty. Several specific issues are taken concerning how the processor assigns a focal structure to an input sentence, how it identifies the topic of the sentence, how implicit restrictors on the domain of quantification are interpreted and how the identification of the content of a restrictor may guide the processor's use of discourse information. Exploiting intuitions about preferred interpretations of ambiguous sentences as well as the results of both old and new experimental studies, a theory of the preferred interpretation of Determiner Phrases is presented. This work explores important, but overlooked questions in on-line sentence interpretation and attempts to erect some of the scaffolding for an eventual theory of sentence interpretation.

Download or read book The Inheritance of Presupposition written by John Dinsmore and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1981-01-01 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents a procedural account of the so-called projection problem for presupposition. It is assumed that presuppositions embedded in complex sentences are subject to no projection rules or ad-hoc conditions whatever, but are in fact satisfied in appropriate contexts in a completely uniform way. It is demonstrated that the apparent filtering, alteration, or preservation of an embedded presupposition is in evry case a logical consequence of a general, independently motivated model of language processing and knowledge representation. It is shown in detail that turning the projection problem upside-down in this way leads to a far more explanatory and descriptively adequate accunt that any previously proposed.

Download or read book The Role of Context in the Comprehension of Literal Metaphorical and Literally Inappropriate Sentences written by Claire James and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Partitioned Representations written by John Dinsmore and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1991 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One: Nuts and Bolts.- 1. Mental Representation.- Symbolism: The Classical Paradigm.- Cracks in the Symbolic Paradigm.- Connectionism: The Other Paradigm.- Methods of Models.- Assessing Theories of Mental Representation.- 2. Partitioned Representations.- General Overview.- The Contents of Spaces.- Parochial Reasoning.- Primary Contexts.- Partitioned Semantics.- Coherence.- Consolidation.- Secondary Contexts.- A Typology of Spaces.- Where Partitioned Representations Get Their Power.- Summary and Conclusions.- 3. Language: Process and Structure.- A Simple Philosophy of Language.- Linguistic Explanation.- The Process of Language Understanding.- Linguistic Evidence for Mental Representations.- 4. Three Levels of Language Processing.- Parochial Processing.- Distribution.- Contextualization.- An Example Discourse.- Conclusions.- Two: Studies in Language.- 5. Pedro's Donkey and Oedipus's Mother.- Some Common Parochial Linguistic Processes.- Some Common Cases of Distribution.- Interaction of Distribution and Parochial Processes.- Summary and Conclusions.- 6. Satisfying Presuppositions in Discourse.- The Problem of Presupposition.- Presupposition and Parochial Processing.- What Happens in Complex Sentences?.- Conclusions.- 7. Space Frogs and Henry Ford.- Linguistic Evidence for Contextualization.- The Semantic Contributions of Space Cues.- Summary.- 8. Temporal Aspect.- Reference Time: Temporal Perspective.- Semantics and Construction.- Reference Time: Contextualization.- The Case of the Present Perfect.- Conclusion.- 9. General Conclusions.- An Assessment of Partitioned Representations.- Prospectus.- The Importance of Partitioned Representations.- Appendices: Formal Models.- 10. A Logic of Partitioned Representations.- The Syntax of PR.- Rules of Inference for PR.- The Semantics of PR.- Soundness.- Conclusions.- 11. Generalized Natural Deduction.- Generalized Natural Deduction.- Time and Action.- Frames.- Summary and Conclusions.- 12. A Computational Model.- The Design of Spaceprobe.- Customizing Digestion.- Restructuring Rules for Distribution.- Handling Queries.- Language Understanding in Spaceprobe.- Summary.- References.- Author Index.

Download or read book A Presuppositional Analysis of Specific Indefinites written by Jae-Il Yeom and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1998. In this book the author presents the view that although many linguists have been interested in specific indefinites, their theories are not quite satisfactory in that they have only tried to explore some aspects of specific indefinites. This paper assumes a standard notion of specificity, i.e., the notion of someone having-in-mind an individual or a relation. Under this assumption, there is an attempt to review previous studies on specific indefinites, and propose a new theory of specificity which I believe can capture all aspects which the previous studies have explored. This leads us to a new information theory which is partially representational and partially denotational., and which is useful for dealing with conversational aspects, like the distinction between the speaker and the audience.

Download or read book An Analysis of the Usage and Effect of Presupposition and Entailment in Isaac Marion s Novel Warm Bodies written by Ann-Kathrin Beckenbauer and published by . This book was released on 2016-01-08 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 3,0, University of Wurzburg (Universitat), course: Semantics, language: English, abstract: This paper is going to deal with the usage and effects of 'presupposition' and 'entailment' with regard to the emergence of these semantic theories in Isaac Marion's novel Warm Bodies. For this purpose, the following will be subdivided into two main parts. The first one will be an introductory part in which every tool and term that is to be used will be spelled out. The first chapter is going to deal with 'truth values' and 'truth conditions'. The terms 'truth condition' and 'truth value', as well as the meaning of 'priori' and 'posteriori' truth are going to be pointed out in order to show the relations of the theory of 'truth' with the ones of 'entailment' and 'presupposition'. The second chapter is going to analyze 'presuppositions' and its main ideas. For this purpose, the chapter is going to begin with a proper definition of this theory. It is to be pointed out what 'presuppositions' are, how they are used and how the many possible 'presuppositions' can be distinguished from one another in general by their triggers. In order to do so, this is going to be followed by an explanatory part about 'presupposition triggers', including which these triggers are and how they are used, as well as some examples. The third chapter is going to examine the semantic theory of 'entailment' and its main ideas. At first, it will be pointed out what 'entailment' means by using a truth-based definition by John I. Saeed. In order to explain how this semantic theory works, this paragraph will also include some examples, as well as a short excurse to 'hyponymy', since this is a regular source for entailment between sentences. Furthermore, the so called 'truth table' will be introduced in order to improve the accessibility of the theory by visualizing it. The second part is going to be"