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Semantics and Pragmatics

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Doctoral Dissertations

Theses/Dissertations

Presupposition

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Counterdirectionality In The Grammar: Reversals And Restitutions, Jyoti Iyer Nov 2023

Counterdirectionality In The Grammar: Reversals And Restitutions, Jyoti Iyer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an exploration of counterdirectionality, a semantic notion encompassing various sorts of reversals, involving either movement along a path, or---more abstractly---the restoring of an object or a state of affairs to a prior condition. Counterdirectionality is a relationship between an asserted event and a presupposed event in a strict temporal ordering. Across languages, it is frequently expressed by presuppositional adverbs that mean BACK (as in English Ali flew back from New York, Bina hugged Ali back, The door swung back open). The distribution of BACK-adverbs tends to overlap in a systematic way with that of …


Representing Context: Presupposition Triggers And Focus-Sensitivity, Alexander Goebel Dec 2020

Representing Context: Presupposition Triggers And Focus-Sensitivity, Alexander Goebel

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the role of Focus-sensitivity for a typology of presupposition triggers. The central hypothesis is that Focus-sensitive triggers require a linguistic antecedent in the discourse model, whereas presuppositions of triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity are satisfied as entailments of the Common Ground. This hypothesis is supported by experimental evidence from two borne out predictions. First, Focus-sensitive triggers are sensitive to the salience of the antecedent satisfying their presupposition, as operationalized via the Question Under Discussion, and lead to interference-type effects, while triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity are indifferent to the QUD-structure. Second, Focus-sensitive triggers are harder to globally accommodate than triggers lacking …