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Rae Langton and Caroline West famously argue that pornography operates like a language game, in that it introduces certain views about women into the common ground via presupposition accommodation. While this pragmatic model explains how pornography has the potential to change its viewers' beliefs, it leaves open how pornography changes people's desires. Our aim in this paper is to show how Langton and West's discourse-theoretic account of pornography can be refined to close this lacuna. Using tools from recent developments in discourse theory, we propose that pornography issues implicit directives, and thereby introduces bouletic components into the discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The positive, non-exclusive inference of only has been famously elusive with respect to its projective status and its content: in some cases the positive inference behaves like a presupposition, while in others it does not; in some cases the inference is non-modal, corresponding to the prejacent of only or an existential counterpart of it, while in others it is modalized. This behavior, we argue, surfaces the exceptive nature of only (cf. von Fintel and Iatridou in Linguist Inq 38(3):445–483, 2007). More specifically, if the import of only is distributed between a minimality and a subtraction component, as has been argued for exceptives (esp. Gajewski in Nat Lang Semant 16(1):69–110, 2008), the apparently irreconcilable properties of only can be captured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we articulate a pragmatic account of the projection behavior of three classes of non-anaphoric projective contents: the pre-states of change of state (CoS) predicates, the veridical entailments of factives, and the implication of satisfaction of selectional restrictions. Given evidence that the triggers of these implications are not anaphoric, hence do not impose presuppositional constraints on their local contexts, we argue that the projection behavior of these implications cannot be explained by the standard Karttunen/Heim/van der Sandt proposals. But we recognize that parallels between the projection behavior of these implications and the projection behavior of anaphorically-triggered implications must be explained. The current account offers a unified explanation of why the predicates in question give rise to projection at all; why projection of these implications is susceptible to contextual suppression; and why projection is systematically filtered in the standard Karttunen filtering environments, despite the absence of contextual constraints. We demonstrate that our account largely makes the same predictions for filtering of anaphoric and non-anaphoric presuppositions, and briefly support the claim that in the case of disjunction, filtering in the two cases is not fully parallel, as predicted by our account. We also briefly discuss how the well-documented variability in projection across predicates in the same semantic class can be understood within our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Testimony is a source of knowledge. A speaker asserts what a hearer may therefore come to know. Assertion has widely been treated as the exclusive or at least the paradigmatic vehicle for testimony. I argue that we testify not only by asserting something, but also by taking something for granted within some other utterance. In philosophy of language, this is called semantic presupposition. The very reasons leading theorists of testimony have for thinking that assertion can be testimony are equally reasons for thinking semantic presupposition can be testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose an account of interpretive effects involving same and different, relying on two claims: the first is that same and different are able to take scope, and the second is that they are presuppositional. On this account, same and different are decomposed into two parts: an additive operator TOO and a (non-)identity predicate. We argue that this account provides a more parsimonious account of well-known properties of same and different, such as the distinction between internal and external readings, as well as the parallelism effects discovered by Hardt and Mikkelsen (Linguist Philos 38:289–314, 2015). We also present a solution to a previously unexplained puzzle involving comparatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Arabic Language Sciences & Literature / Maǧallaẗ ʻulūm Al-luġaẗ Al-ʻarabiyyaẗ Wa-ādābi-hā is the property of Arab Journal of Sciences & Research Publishing (AJSRP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Adab Al-Kufa is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Presuppositions are at the same time a crucial and almost neglected dimension of arguments and fallacies. Arguments involve different types of presuppositions, which can be used for manipulative purposes in distinct ways. However, what are presuppositions? What is their dialectical function? Why and how can they be dangerous? This paper intends to address these questions by developing the pragmatic approaches to presupposition from a dialectical perspective. The use of presuppositions will be analyzed in terms of presumptive conclusions concerning the interlocutor's acceptance of a proposition, which can be assessed as reasonable or unacceptable. Their dialectical function is described in terms of dark side commitments attributed to a collective "voice" representing what is commonly shared. For this reason, they count as attempts to include the presupposed contents into the hearer's commitment store, which in some circumstances can reverse the burden of proof. The different manipulative strategies grounded on controversial presuppositions will be examined by showing the distinct roles that the latter play and the relationship between the degrees of presuppositional implicitness and the speaker's burden of retraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a simultaneous interpreter professional competence that consists of three components – communicative, extralinguistic and procedural or specialized (sub)competences. It is focused on the third component, which includes the abilities of inferencing, probabilistic forecasting and compression, specifically required for simultaneous interpreting (SI). Inferencing is a two-staged process of retrieving assumptions with regards to composing invariant senses, which means deriving inferences of the message in the source language (SL) and generating implicatures in the target language (TL). Probabilistic forecasting is based on the analysis of the invariant sense prompts in the SL message and boils down to anticipating invariant sense evolvement in the context. It is closely related to compression – an ability to eliminate the redundant information and to condense the retrieved invariant sense in the SI for linguistic and extralinguistic reasons, such as interlanguage asymmetries between the source and target languages and an acute shortage of time because of the speaker’s speed. Moreover, compression is one of the key discursive strategies used by the simultaneous interpreter in speech production. These information processing abilities stand for the SI inherent cognitive features or mechanisms and cognitive-and-discursive strategies employed by the simultaneous interpreter in order to meet the pragmatic needs of a SI communicative situation. Descriptive, comparative, model simulation, introspection and observation methods were used for the research task realization. The outcomes of the study show that the above mentioned three cognitive mechanisms, discursive strategies and abilities closely interact in the SI; it is manifested through inferences and implicatures generated on the basis of presuppositions. Relying on his/her professional competence and employing discursive strategies of inferencing, probabilistic forecasting and compression, the simultaneous interpreter chooses the adequate language means to render invariant sense in its transition from the source to target languages. The choice is facilitated by presuppositional knowledge rooted in the worldview of the source and target languages, constituting the simultaneous interpreter’s language and conceptual thesauri. Another important factor assisting SI cognitive processes and the choice of discursive strategies is the analysis of text functions that makes it possible to elicit presuppositions helpful for inferencing and probabilistic forecasting.

Notwithstanding the fact that 幽默 youmo ‘humour’ is a neologism and transliteration coined in the 1920s, the conception has been existing in Chinese civilisation for millennia. The earliest extant treatise on humour in Chinese literature is regarded to be an anthology 笑林 Xiao Lin ‘The Forest of Laughs’ cumulated circa 2ndc CE, yet the most illustrious pre-modern jestbook is a 1791 assemblage entitled 笑林广记 Xiao Lin Guang Ji ‘A Collection of Classic Chinese Jokes’. In the 2000s, stand-up comedy entered China’s entertainment market as a niche cultural import, though it was, and still is, mistranslated into 脱口秀 tuokouxiu ‘talk show’. Recently, stand-up comedy attains visibility in China by means of phenomenal online programmes. I postulate that Chinese stand-up comedy is featured by unique attributes, in that it is disparate from ‘A Collection of Classic Chinese Jokes’ and the traditional theatrical comedy called 相声 xiangsheng ‘cross-talk’, and it is not parallel to its equivalent in the West either. To be more specific, being subject to stringent censorship, stand-up comedy in China is circumspect about content appertaining to (homo)sexual titillation and supernaturalism. Nonetheless, I posit that in terms of inducing humorous effects, contemporary stand-up comedy still evinces similitude to ‘A Collection of Classic Chinese Jokes’ from phonetic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives.

Sözce oluşturan/konuşan/yazar ve sözceye maruz kalan/dinleyen/okur arasında ortak bilgi birikiminin olması iletişimin sağlığı ve devamlılığı için gereklidir. Bu bilgiler kimi zaman sözce içinde açıkça söylenirken çoğu zaman açıkça söylenmemektedir. Sözce oluşturulurken göndericinin ve alıcının bildiği örtük bilgiye önvarsayım denir. Önvarsayım “konuşmacının sözcesinde açıkça dile getirmediği fakat sözcedeki sözlüksel ve sözdizimsel yapıya bağlı olarak ortaya çıkan, dinleyenin de kesin olarak bildiğini kabul ettiği bütün bilgiler” şeklinde tanımlanabilir. Önvarsayımlar genellikle tetikleyicilerine göre sınıflandırılır. Önvarsayım tetikleyicisi sözce içinde önvarsayım durumuna kaynaklık eden her bir söz birimi veya yapıdır. Bu çalışmada, Türk milletinin millî marşı ve Türk milleti için önemli bir yere sahip İstiklâl Marşı’ndaki önvarsayımlar ve bu önvarsayımların tetikleyicileri ele alınmıştır. Çalışmanın amacı, Millî Mücadele zamanından günümüze içinde bir milletin ortak hafızasını barındıran bu metnin önvarsayımlarını ve önvarsayım tetikleyicilerini belirleyerek şiirin önvarsayımlar aracılığıyla verdiği mesajlar yanında, tarihsel ve kültürel kodları taşıyıcılığı üzerinde durmaktır. Çalışmada İstiklâl Marşı’nın tamamı incelenmiştir. Çalışma, nitel araştırma yöntemlerine göre yürütülmüştür. Araştırmanın verileri doküman incelemesi yöntemiyle toplanmış, elde edilen veriler betimsel analiz yöntemiyle analiz edilmiştir. İstiklâl Marşı’nda varoluşsal (69), sözlüksel (50), yapısal (6), olgusal olmayan (3) ve karşı olgusal (2) önvarsayım tespit edilmiştir. Önvarsayımların ortaya çıkmasında dış gönderim (2), art gönderim (10) ve ön gönderimden (1) yararlanıldığı görülmüştür. Varoluşsal önvarsayımdan sonra en sık rastlanan önvarsayım türü olan sözlüksel önvarsayımın ortaya çıkmasında uzlaşımsal önvarsayım tetikleyicisi (24) en sık gözlenen tetikleyicidir. Uzlaşımsal önvarsayım tetikleyicilerinin sağladığı önvarsayımlarda önvarsayımın tespit edilmesi, sözcenin ya da metnin ait olduğu toplumun tüm yönlerine hâkim olmayı gerektirmektedir. Bu tetikleyicinin ortaya çıkardığı önvarsayımlar ayrı bir çalışmanın konusu olabilir.

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Copyright of Journal of Scientific Development for Studies & Research (JSD) is the property of Journal of Scientific Development for Studies & Research (JSD) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Turcology Research is the property of Ataturk University Coordinatorship of Scientific Journals and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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Despite recent breakthroughs in Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing, the Natural Language Inference (NLI) problems still constitute a challenge. To this purpose, we contribute a new dataset that focuses exclusively on the factivity phenomenon; however, our task remains the same as other NLI tasks, that is prediction of entailment, contradiction, or neutral (ECN). In this paper, we describe the LingFeatured NLI corpus and present the results of analyses designed to characterize the factivity/non-factivity opposition in natural language. The dataset contains entirely natural language utterances in Polish and gathers 2432 verb-complement pairs and 309 unique verbs. The dataset is based on the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) and is a representative subcorpus in regard to syntactic construction [V][że][cc]. We also present an extended version of the set (3035 sentences) consisting more sentences with internal negations. We prepared deep learning benchmarks for both sets. We found that transformer BERT-based models working on sentences obtained relatively good results ( $\approx 89\%$ F1 score on base dataset). Even though better results were achieved using linguistic features ( $\approx 91\%$ F1 score on base dataset), this model requires more human labor (humans in the loop) because features were prepared manually by expert linguists. BERT-based models consuming only the input sentences show that they capture most of the complexity of NLI/factivity. Complex cases in the phenomenon—for example, cases with entitlement (E) and non-factive verbs—still remain an open issue for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Signos is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article analyzes debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, in which the interviewees are faced with questions or statements that imply that their gender, ethnicity or background prevent them from fulfilling their function as politicians successfully, in accordance with the "Gendered mediation thesis" (GoodYear-Grant 2013). We focus on the interviewees' responses to these questions, and particularly on how grammatically negative utterances are deployed in the service of coping with the presuppositions directed at them. The analysis indicates that the negative utterances do not carry the full weight of rejection of implied presuppositions. Moreover, in some cases negative utterances are used by the speakers as part of a hedging strategy. By describing the role of negation in debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, the paper aims to advance a more comprehensive understanding of linguistic patterns used by women, and other silenced groups, to cope with biased representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presupposition can be said to be an assumption of a speaker prior to making an utterance or an implied claim of an utterance. Using qualitative method, the researchers examined various language structures that give rise to presuppositions. This was pursued by exploring the State of the Nation Address (SONA) delivered by President Akufo-Addo of Ghana on 30th March 2022. The analysis of the SONA, as the data of the study, revealed the utilization of a number of presupposition triggers – such as possessive construction, “one” construction, definite noun phrase, adverbial clause, relative clause, “even” construction, iteratives, change of state verbs, and factive verbs or phrases – under the existential, structural and lexical presuppositions. The article thus opines that the enactment of presuppositions, through the identified forms, affords the President the opportunity to disseminate his message with a higher degree of veracity on the conditions and happenings of the Ghanaian state.

This article examines the phenomenon of blending cognitive assets of communicants in the process of communicative relevance generation. Relevance is shown as the situative significance of propositions and presuppositions for each of the communication participants. The main purpose of the study is delimitation of assonant, dissonant and consonant relations as a space of collective significance on the basis of cognitive blend of actual, motivation and interpretation significances. As a result of the analysis of simulated dialogs, taking into account the integral model of the individual-collective transition, the key macro-positions and mechanisms of particular positions implication ways variation are determined. Authors defines the main principles of shared communicative relevance as a synergistic interaction of private propositions and presuppositions of all interaction participants. The basis for complex integral analysis of simulated dialogues made by discoursive and modus approach as well by some solutions of hermeneutical-noematic analysis procedure. The topic macroposition is claimed to be the key factor uniting particular relevances within the process of receiver and sender focusing. Subjective significances, entering into a relations of dissonance and assonance ultimately on the basis of communicant’s preoccupation of interaction, modify different areas, adapt diverge components to general cultural cognitive assets and contribute the preservation of the basic proposition of a main common frame. Situative modeling within the framework of constitutive analysis of private significance is applied as general scheme through the prism of the differing premises of the communicants, while the blending of cognitive assets is built according to the formula of subject-subject-object hypostatization. Within the framework of taking into account the initial input components cognitive blending is carried out on the basis of semiotic situative correlation using additive and adaptive speech and cognitive strategies.

Örtük yapının unsurlarından sayılabilecek olan önvarsayım, konuşurun sözcesinde muhatabına ilettiği gizli bilgi parçalarını anlatan bir kavramdır. Önvarsayımlar, konuşurun yüzey yapıda sınırlı birimle gösterdiği ancak derin yapıda karşılığı olan anlamsal arka plandır. Söylenen ile iletilen arasındaki farkla da açıklanan önvarsayımların anlamlı olabilmesi için konuşur ve muhatap arasındaki bağlamın ve bağlamı şekillendiren geçmiş yaşantıların, deneyimlerin, genel-geçer bilgilerin vs. ortak olması gerekmektedir. Olumsuzlanabilme, kesinlik taşıma, gerektirme ilişkisine sahiplik, yüzey yapıda görünüm sunma, odaksıl olmama gibi özellikleri sıralanabilen önvarsayımlar sözcede farklı türden dilsel göstericilerle işaretlenebilme durumlarına göre farklı kategorilere ayrılmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın derlemini Köktürkçe metinlerinden Köl Tigin Yazıtı (KT) oluşturmaktadır. Önvarsayım türleri ve önvarsayım göstericilerinin tarihî bir metindeki görünümünü ortaya koymak amacıyla yapılan bu incelemede önvarsayımlar; varoluşsal önvarsayım, olgusal önvarsayım, sözlüksel önvarsayım, yapısal önvarsayım, olgusal olmayan önvarsayım, karşı olgusal önvarsayım ve çıkarımsal önvarsayım kategorilerine göre değerlendirilmiştir. (KT)’de bu yedi kategorinin belirlediği önvarsayımlar; morfolojik, sözcüksel ve söz dizimsel göstericilerle kodlanma durumlarına göre ayrıca bir tasnife tabi tutulmuştur. Böylece belirli bir metin üzerinden olsa dahi Türkçenin tarihî lehçelerinden biri olan Köktürkçede önvarsayım türleri ve göstericilerinin durumu ve kullanımı hakkında fikir sahibi olunması ve benzer çalışmalara da kaynaklık etmesi hedeflenmiştir.

This essay adopts a Critical Stylistic approach to uncover the linguistic mechanisms of implicit, (counter-)ideological meaning in the female-targeted periodical Good Housekeeping during the interwar period, and chiefly in its "Household Engineering" article series, where a complex discourse of modern housewifery, based on expert advice and industrial rationalisation, was shaped and negotiated through a rhetoric of scientific management and efficiency. In particular, this study investigates the discursive construction of the pervasive image of the female professional homemaker interested in the latest technological methods and innovations, by considering the role played by implicit meaning in shaping feminine roles and dominant gender ideologies. A Critical Stylistic analysis of presupposition and implicature in Good Housekeeping featured articles shows how these strategies reveal implicitly construed ideologies of womanhood, and particularly the way in which the magazine adopted linguistic devices to accommodate modern ideals of femininity without rejecting more traditional ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relevance of the sentence concept to the understanding of three types of implicitness (presupposition, conversational implicatures, irony). Our experimental protocol involved 105 children (aged 6 to 11) and 82 adults who were asked to read short texts composed of a context about some characters and a target sentence conveying one of the three implicit contents. After reading, children and adults had to answer a comprehension yes-no question and indicate the segments from the text that helped them answer the question. Results showed a difference between the three types of implicitness, with presupposition being detected and understood at a subsentential level, whereas implicatures and irony come under extrasentential level requiring the context to be taken into account. Referring to sentence as a unit of meaning does not seem relevant as soon as understanding is not limited to the literal meaning of what is written, but also concerns what is meant by the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our awareness of the boundedness of the spatial sensory field—a paradigmatic structural feature of visual experience—possesses a distinctive epistemic role. Properly understood, this result undermines a widely assumed picture of how visual experience permits us to learn about the world. This paper defends an alternative picture in which visual experience provides at least two kinds of non-inferential justification for beliefs about the external world. Accommodating this justification in turn requires recognising a new way for visual experience to encode information about the world. Reflection upon the epistemic contribution of sensory experience's structural features thus forces us to revise our understanding of how perception, cognition, and the world fit together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article points out how Rodrigo Naves’ critical method incorporates and revises aspects of the philosopher José Arthur Giannotti’s thought. To this end, it highlights how ideas from Giannotti’s Trabalho e reflexão (1983) about the representation of social phenomena are elaborated in two essays on Alberto da Veiga Guignard: “O olhar difuso” (1986) and “O Brasil no ar: Guignard” (1996), the latter included in the book A forma difícil (1996). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation evidentiality bears on the coding of some information as presupposition or as implicature is still an underexplored research field. In this paper, such an interplay is addressed by looking into how presupposed and implied contents (differently) respond to contexts of challenge and deniability. As taken for granted information (Stalnaker, Robert. 1973. Presuppositions. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2(4). 447–457), presupposition is more resistant to both challenging and retracting conversational moves, since it conveys content the speaker does not commit to. By contrast, implicature – characterized as intentional meaning (Grice, Herbert P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press) – allows both challenging and retracting conversational moves, because it is information the speaker commits to the most, similarly to what happens with plain declarative sentences. Building on this account, it is suggested that the higher challenging and deniability status cued by implicature is related to its function of encoding a direct type of evidentiality (Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press), namely a condition in which the speaker presents herself as the first-hand source of some information. Conversely, the weaker challengeability and deniability associated to presupposition hinges on its property of encoding a mutual type of evidentiality (Hintz, Daniel J. & Hintz Diane M. 2017. The evidential category of mutual knowledge in Quechua. Lingua 186. 88–109), that is, a state in which information is construed and conveyed as already shared by all participants at the moment of utterance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to provide a speech act analysis of tweets which are posted by climate change skeptics. It argues that their deliberate flouting and violation of Grice's Cooperative Principle show that they substitute overt denial by conversational implicatures which show skepticism. Based on data from 420 tweets which are responses to climate change discussion, the paper demonstrates that tweeters respond with different deceptive tactics by using conversational implicatures. The article attempts to provide a pragmatic analysis of tweets which are posted by climate change opponents. It argues that their deliberate violation of the CP shows that their attitude shifted from overt denial to skepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to evaluate the role of language in a specific socio-political context. It offers a critical approach and evaluation of the political statements of the European Union representatives regarding the process of the accession of Bosnia and Hercegovina to the European Union. The focus of the linguistic investigation is on the identification of language structures that participate in the development of communicative models that enable the establishment of power relations between participating entities. The linguistic data is obtained through systemic functional grammar and evaluated using critical discourse analysis.

The article attempts to provide a speech act analysis of tweets which are posted by climate change skeptics. It argues that their deliberate flouting and violation of Grice’s Cooperative Principle show that substitute overt denial by conversational implicatures which show skepticism. Based on data from 420 tweets which are responses to climate change discussion, the paper demonstrates that tweeters respond with different deceptive tactics by using conversational implicatures. The article attempts to provide a pragmatic analysis of tweets which are posted by climate change opponents. It argues that their deliberate violation of the CP shows that their attitude shifted from overt denial to skepticism.

This article develops a comparative semantic analysis of representative focus-alternative quantifiers in English and Japanese: (i) only in English, (ii) dake, dake-wa, and shika in Japanese, and (iii) the cleft construction(s in the two languages). A sentence with only typically, and one with shika invariably, conveys the "negative contribution (NC)" (exclusivity implication) as an at-issue content and the "positive contribution (PC)" (prejacent-proposition) as a (non-presuppositional) not-at-issue content. A sentence with dake typically conveys both PC and NC as at-issue contents, while a sentence with dake-wa, as well as the cleft construction, conveys the PC as an at-issue content and the NC as a not-at-issue content. Dake-wa and the cleft semantically contrast in two respects: (i) with the former, the NC is presuppositional, while with the latter it is non-presuppositional, and (ii) only the latter conveys, as a presupposition, that at least one of the relevant alternative propositions holds true. With appropriate contextual cues, only may receive the dake-like, symmetrical interpretation. Dake may receive, in limited configurations, the dake-wa-like interpretation where only the PC is at-issue. These findings contribute to the general-linguistic taxonomy of focus-alternative quantifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse understanding is hampered when missing or conflicting context information is given. In four experiments, we investigated what happens (a) when the definite determiner "the," which presupposes existence and uniqueness, does not find a unique referent in the context or (b) when the appropriate use of the indefinite determiner is violated by the presence of a unique referent (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2). To focus on the time-course of processing the uniqueness presupposition of the definite determiner, we embedded the determiner in different sentence structures and varied the context (Experiment 3 and Experiment 4). Reading time served as an index of processing difficulty in a word-by-word self-paced reading task and acceptability judgments provided hints for a possible repair of a presupposition violation. Our results showed that conflicting and missing context information lowered acceptability ratings and was associated with prolonged reading times. The pattern of results differed depending on the nature of the presupposition (Experiments 1 and 2) and whether supplementing missing context information was possible (Experiment 3 and Experiment 4). Our findings suggest that different cognitive processes come into play when interpreting presuppositions in order to get a meaningful interpretation of a discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with gossip communicated by headlines in a German celebrity magazine. It takes its starting point in a philosophical controversy on the question whether gossip is essentially epistemically (un-)reliable. As a theoretical framework, Farkas & Bruce's Common Ground-based Table model is adopted which distinguishes between different ways of introducing propositions into the Common Ground. Relating the model to the reliability status of propositions, it is argued that depending on the way in which a proposition is added to the Common Ground, it will be assigned varying epistemic status. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of 87 sentential gossip headlines from the German celebrity magazine BUNTE, it is shown that gossip is communicated both via assertion, presupposition, and conversational implicature, and that each of these ways of communication entails a different certainty status of the proposition added to the Common Ground. This means that gossip is neither essentially unreliable nor essentially reliable. Rather, the resulting 'gossip Common Ground' is best described as a set of epistemically heterogeneous propositions. • Media gossip is communicated via assertion, presupposition and conversational implicature. • Media gossip consists of a set of epistemically heterogeneous propositions. • Biased polar questions in gossip convey affirmative implicatures. • Newsworthy presuppositions as a strategy to communicate epistemically dubious propositions. • Analysis based on annotated corpus of celebrity gossip headlines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generic sentences are commonsense statements of the form 'Fs are G,' like 'Bears have fur' or 'Rattlesnakes are poisonous.' Kind theories hold that rather than being general statements about individual objects, they are particular statements about kinds. This paper examines the standard objections against the kind theory and argues that they only apply to the most simplified version of the theory. The more sophisticated version, which has received little discussion in the literature in spite of having been formulated concurrently with the simple version, is immune to this standard battery of objections. After discussing four distinctive features of generic sentences, the paper then presents a modernized extension of the sophisticated kind theory which explains the presence of these features. Although the choice between a kind theory and the more standardly accepted adverbial quantificational theory is complex, these considerations suggest that the two approaches are at least deserving of equal consideration for the purposes of natural language semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A previous functional magnetic resonance imaging study (Dietrich et al. [2019]. Discourse management during speech perception: A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. NeuroImage, 202, 116047.) showed a contribution by the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA), the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and the basal ganglia (BG) in the processing of discourse structure. By applying dynamic causal modelling (DCM) to the data of this previous study, we aimed to shed further light on the functional interrelationships of these areas. Discourse coherence had been manipulated by using presupposition triggers in a test sentence that either corresponded or failed to correspond to a contextual item. We found connections from pre-SMA to IFG and from pre-SMA to BG. Additionally, participants' ability to accommodate violations modulated the coupling from the BG to the pre-SMA. We discuss this pattern in light of the aslant tract transmitting control signals from the pre-SMA to the IFG that slow down procedural processing in case of errors. The pre-SMA itself seems to be regulated by the BG depending on whether participants accommodate a violation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Best practice and descriptive research claim that presuppositions, such as the "too" in "#MeToo," increase the persuasiveness of arguments. Surprisingly, there is hardly any causal evidence for this claim. Therefore, we tested experimentally if advertisements and political statements with presuppositions are more persuasive than equivalent assertions. In 1999, Sbisà already theorized that "persuasive presuppositions" incidentally urge addressees to extend their (ideological) knowledge to make true the unstated assumptions writers have about what their addressee knows, which leads to greater agreement. Following Sbisà, we hypothesized that the persuasiveness depends on the addressee's need and willingness to accommodate the presupposed content. In three experiments, we manipulated (a) the presupposition trigger using either the German additive particle auch "too," the iterative particle wieder "again," or factive verbs compared to assertive equivalents and (b) the preceding discourse context which supported the presupposition or not. Results show that presuppositions are perceived as more persuasive if they convey discourse-new information, largely irrespective of addressees' ideological involvement. Also considering eye-tracked reading, we suggest that the integrative cognitive process of presupposition accommodation initiates their persuasive edge. The findings imply that persuasive communication benefits from the use of lexically conveyed presuppositions if they are sufficiently informative to trigger accommodation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]