Asymmetries in Presupposition Projection and the Nature of Meaning

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jacopo Romoli
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522349364

Linguistic utterances are processed incrementally as they unfold in time, resulting in a temporal asymmetry between the before and after of a given expression. The present project addresses the fundamental question of whether observed asymmetries are merely a by-product of linguistic utterances unfolding in time, or whether they play a direct role in linguistic knowledge and representations. Addressing this question is critical because it has important potential consequences on the very way we conceptualize the meaning of sentences and how they interact with contextual information. This bears on the general issue of how linguistic knowledge and other cognitive faculties interact; a core issue in the study of language and the human mind. Asymmetries in the interpretation of presuppositions - a particular aspect of linguistic meaning, which characteristically interacts with both the linguistic and extra-linguistic context - provide an ideal case study for investigating this issue. To illustrate, the presupposition trigger 'stop' in the sentence in (1) introduces the presupposition that Mary used to come to class, i.e., (1) is typically uttered in contexts where this is already taken for granted: (1) Mary stopped coming to class. Importantly, presuppositions in complex sentences are traditionally thought to be asymmetrically computed, such that the presupposition of a trigger (e.g. 'stop') requires support in the preceding discourse context. This is illustrated by the contrast in (2). Introducing the material supporting the presupposition before the trigger, as in (2a), makes for a felicitous utterance, while the reverse configuration (2b) does not (indicated by '#'). (2) a. Mary used to come to class and she stopped (coming to class). b. #Mary stopped coming to class and she used to (come to class). However, such contrasts may (at least in part) be due to independent factors, e.g. redundancy constraints, and could reflect violable processing constraints rather than being grammatically hard-wired. The effect also may vary across connectives, e.g., in disjunctions or conditionals. Finally, basic data points such as (2) leave open whether the effect is due to linear order or the underlying hierarchical structure assumed to be crucial for the computation of meaning. Thus, the issue of asymmetry in presupposition projection is far from resolved, and so multi-faceted that careful experimental investigation is called for. The present project will explore these issues experimentally and theoretically, combining fine-grained theoretical predictions about presuppositions, rooted in formal semantics and philosophy of language, with models of language processing. The outputs of this project will contribute to a number of ongoing debates in several disciplines in the cognitive sciences, e.g., linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and neurolinguistics, thereby informing our understanding of the human mind more generally.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants