Obligatory Presupposition Triggers – Experimental Evidence

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The project is concerned with the experimental investigation of the obligatory occurrence of presupposition triggers. The conclusion of the first funding period was that presupposition (PSP) triggers fall into two classes with respect to their obligatory insertion. The insertion of one set of triggers, including definites, follows from a principle Maximize Presupposition (MaxPres; Heim 1991), whereas the insertion of another set of triggers is dependent on the obligatory occurrence of exhaustivity implicature (Bade 2016). In German, iteratives (wieder "again") and additives (auch "also") fall into the second class of "pragmatic" triggers, whereas the definite article and other presuppositional features fall into the first class of more "grammatical" triggers. A contrastive study on the language Ga indicates that additives are obligatory irrespective of previous exhaustification, and that their use is thus better captured by Maximize Presupposition.In the second funding period, we want to address two major questions raised by our previous findings. First, does class membership of a trigger have an impact on processing? Reading time studies are supposed to shed light on this issue. Obligatory Implicatures predicts missing trigger inferences to be processed like implicatures, while Maximize Presupposition posits a special inference whose status is yet to be further elucidated. Second, what is the source of the crosslinguistic variation in the obligatoriness of the trigger? Bade (2016) identifies morphosyntactically overt exhaustivity marking as a potential factor. Overt exhaustivity marking can be found both in Ga ("ni"-cleft) and in Chinese (particles "cái" and "jiù"). Having specified the exhaustive meaning contribution of the expressions in question, we want to investigate their potential influence on the obligatory insertion of PSP triggers.