The What and When of Processing Projective Content

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The investigation of projective content (PC) has mostly relied on introspective and off-line methods like the Family-of-sentences-test and the 'Hey, wait a minute'-test. These methods have been very fruitful in delineating the different classes of PC, and have been applied to a variety of languages. In the past ten years, these results have been backed up by a number of on-line studies investigating the absolute timing of processing steps driven by different types of PC. However, what still seems to be lacking is a precise picture of the relative timing of the procedural steps involved in the interpretation of expressions that are classified as projective in the literature.In this project, we aim at laying a foundation for the experimental study of the relative timing of interpretive steps involved in the processing of different types of PC relative to that of other types of linguistic information (morphological, syntactic, lexical). The project will be concerned with three types of PC: uniqueness presuppositions, expressives, and additivity/exclusivity presuppositions/implica-tures. All three branches of investigation will be based on the assumption that PCs exert contextual felicity conditions; hence, we will manipulate the contextual properties of target sentences containing triggers for PC by providing them with different types of context. Moreover, all three branches use the time-course of the processing of a (non-PC) expression in the target sentence as an anchor point relative to which the timing of the effects of PC will be measured. That is, we will use the well-established effects of a number of morphosyntactic and lexical manipulations (attachment preferences, effects of implicit causality, etc.) as a benchmark relative to which the onset and the unfolding of interpretive steps affected by PC can be measured. In a parallel part of the project, we plan to use down-sized versions of our materials for testing children to learn more about the acquisition of PC processing.We will employ a combination of off-line and on-line methods, among them felicity ratings, 2AFC tasks with and without mouse tracking. Most importantly, we will use eye tracking in reading to pinpoint the exact timing of interpretive steps.The contribution this project will make to the overall priority programme XPRAG.de is two-fold: on the one hand, we hope to further our understanding of the psycholinguistics of processing PC, i.e. of the representations and processes underlying its processing, and its acquisition; in addition, our results will contribute to the methodological options available for the experimental study of PC. On the other hand, our results on the time-course of processing different types of PC will contribute to the discussion of the heterogeneity of PC, and ultimately may lead to a more fine-grained distinction of types of PC based on their processing behaviour.