Chemla, Emmanuel and Philippe Schlenker. (2009). “Incremental vs. Symmetric Accounts of Presupposition Projection: An Experimental Approach”. Manuscript, IJN, LSCP & NYU.

[Full paper in pdf]

Abstract: The presupposition triggered by an expression E is generally satisfied by information that comes before rather than after E in the sentence or discourse. In Heim's classic theory (1983), this left-right asymmetry is encoded in the lexical semantics of dynamic connectives and operators. But several recent analyses offer a more nuanced approach, in which presupposition satisfaction has two separate components: a general principle (which varies from theory to theory) specifies under what conditions a presupposition triggered by an expression E is satisfied; and an ‘incremental’ component specifies that the principle must be checked on the basis of information that comes before E. Several researchers take this incremental component to be a processing bias, which can be overcome at some cost. If so, it should be possible, although costly, to satisfy presuppositions ‘symmetrically’, i.e., taking into account an entire sentence. We test this claim with experimental means. Using different ‘hard’ triggers, we show that in the propositional case symmetric readings are indeed possible, albeit degraded; and we compare the availability of symmetric readings in environments that involve various operators.