Obligatory Presupposition Triggers – Experimental Evidence

本课题是关于预设触发器的必然发生的实验研究。第一个筹资期的结论是，预设（PSP）触发器就其强制性插入而言分为两类。一组触发器的插入，包括定义，遵循一个原则最大化预设（MaxPres; Heim 1991），而另一组触发器的插入依赖于穷竭性含义的强制性发生（Bade 2016）。在德语中，迭代词（较宽的“again”）和助词（较宽的“also”）属于第二类“语用”触发器，而定冠词和其他预设特征则属于第一类更“语法化”的触发器。对Ga语言的对比研究表明，添加剂是强制性的，与先前的耗尽无关，因此，它们的使用可以更好地用最大化预设来描述。在第二个资助期，我们希望解决我们以前的调查结果提出的两个主要问题。首先，触发器的类成员关系对处理有影响吗？阅读时间研究应该能揭示这个问题。强制性蕴涵预测缺失的触发推理将像蕴涵一样被处理，而最大化预设则假设了一种特殊的推理，其地位有待进一步阐明。第二，触发的强制性的跨语言差异的来源是什么？Bade（2016）认为形态句法上明显的穷竭标记是一个潜在的因素。在Ga（“ni”-cleft）和汉语（粒子“cái”和“jiù”）中都可以找到明显的穷竭标记。在指定了所讨论的表达式的详尽意义贡献之后，我们想调查它们对强制插入PSP触发器的潜在影响。

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.