Abstract
The role of linear order for presupposition projection is a key theoretical question, but the empirical status of (a-)symmetries in projection from various connectives remains controversial. We present experimental evidence that presupposition projection from disjunction is symmetric. 'Bathroom disjunctions', where either disjunct seems able to support a presupposition in the other if its negation entails it, have been argued to be evidence for symmetric projection; but there are alternative theoretical options. Adapting the paradigm of Mandelkern et al. (2020) for projection from conjunction, our experimental data supports the view that we are dealing with genuinely symmetric projection from disjunction. This contrasts with Mandelkern et al.'s findings for asymmetric projection from conjunction, and thus provides evidence for variation in projection (a-)symmetry across connectives, contra accounts proposing general accounts predicting uniform asymmetry effects due to left-to-right processing (e.g. Schlenker 2009).
Highlights
In this paper we present experimental results aimed at testing the projection behavior of presupposition triggers in Partee’s so-called ‘bathroom disjunctions’, as in (1):(1) a
Our results indicate that bathroom disjunctions constitute cases of genuinely symmetric projection from disjunction: it makes no difference in terms of acceptability judgments if the presupposition is in the first or the second disjunct, in contrast to Mandelkern et al.’s findings for conjunction
We only presented the COND-PS condition in the SUPPORT context, as it is infelicitous to assert a bathroom disjunction in a context that explicitly supports the presupposition: (19) (Uttered in a context where we know that the house has a bathroom) # Either the bathroom is in a weird place or this house has no bathroom!
Summary
In this paper we present experimental results aimed at testing the projection behavior of presupposition triggers in Partee’s so-called ‘bathroom disjunctions’, as in (1):(1) a. The definite the bathroom presupposes that the house has a bathroom, but the whole sentence does not carry such a presupposition, apparently because the other disjunct explicitly raises the possibility of there not being one. On one view, such examples have been taken to show that disjunctions exhibit symmetric presupposition filtering, i.e., that both preceding and following material in a complex sentence is considered in evaluating the presupposition; here, the negation of the other disjunct is what is considered in assessing the presupposition, and as it entails the existence of a bathroom, the presupposition of the definite is supported sentence internally, and ‘filtered’ (in Karttunen’s terminology) and not present as a presupposition of the complex sentence as a whole.
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