Presupposition Accommodation of the German Additive Particle auch (= “too”)

Mira Grubic,Marta Wierzba

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2019.00015

Abstract

Presupposition triggers differ with respect to whether their presupposition is easily accommodatable. The presupposition of focus-sensitive additive particles like also or too is often classified as hard to accommodate, i.e., these triggers are infelicitous if their presupposition is not entailed by the immediate linguistic or non-linguistic context. We tested two competing accounts for the German additive particle auch concerning this requirement: First, that it requires a focus alternative to the whole proposition to be salient, and second, that it merely requires an alternative to the focused constituent (e.g., an individual) to be salient. We conducted two experiments involving felicity judgments as well as questions asking for the truth of the presupposition to be accommodated. Our results suggest that the latter account is too weak: mere previous mention of a potential alternative to the focused constituent is not enough to license the use of auch. However, our results also suggest that the former account is too strong: when an alternative of the focused constituent is prementioned and certain other accommodation-enhancing factors are present, the context does not have to entail the presupposed proposition. We tested the following two potentially accommodation-enhancing factors: First, whether the discourse can be construed to be from the perspective of the individual that the presupposition is about, and second, whether the presupposition is needed to establish coherence between the host sentence of the additive particle and the preceding context. The factor coherence was found to play a significant role. Our results thus corroborate the results of other researchers showing that discourse participants go to great lengths in order to identify a potential presupposition to accommodate, and we contribute to these results by showing that coherence is one of the factors that enhance accommodation.

Highlights

Additive particles belong to the class of alternative-sensitive particles, i.e., they interact with alternatives
The direction of the interactions between TRIGGER TYPE and CONTEXT is partially compatible with the predictions of the SALIENT PROPOSITION account: in the mixed context, 8The linear models reported in this paper were fit following the recommendations for identifying parsimonious models by Bates et al (2015a); i.e., we successively reduced the maximal model by removing terms from the random effect structure that showed signs of overfitting until arriving at a model whose principle components all explain non-zero variance and which provides a better fit than the minimal model
We tested the predictions made by the two main accounts on the anaphoricity of additive particles found in the literature: the SALIENT INDIVIDUAL account, which predicts that auch just requires a focus alternative to the focused constituent to be salient, and the SALIENT PROPOSITION account, which predicts that the context needs to entail a focus alternative to the entire proposition containing auch

Summary

Introduction

Additive particles belong to the class of alternative-sensitive particles, i.e., they interact with alternatives. Since the German equivalents of these three triggers will play a role in our experiments, this is demonstrated here for them by checking whether the respective trigger is infelicitous in a neutral context, a context that doesn’t entail the presupposition, in contrast to a minimally different positive context which does entail the presupposition (test and examples taken from Tonhauser et al, 2013) These sentences were tested as part of our fillers in both experiments, and, as expected, the sentences (a) in which the context does not entail the presupposition were rated felicitous in (8) (with a mean rating of 4.12 on a 5-point scale3), but substantially worse in (9)– (10) (mean rating: 2.16/2.79, respectively). All sentences were judged to be felicitous in the minimally different contexts in (b) entailing the presupposition (with mean ratings of 4.74/4.00/4.82, respectively, on a 5-point scale)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion