Abstract
The present study investigated how listeners understand and process the definite and the indefinite determiner. While the definite determiner clearly conveys a uniqueness presupposition, the status of the anti-uniqueness inference associated with the indefinite determiner is less clear. In a forced choice production task, we observed that participants make use of the information about number usually associated with the two determiners to convey a message. In a subsequent mouse-tracking task, participants had to select one of two potential referents presented on screen according to an auditorily presented stimulus sentence. The data revealed that participants use the information about uniqueness or anti-uniqueness encoded in determiners to disambiguate sentence meaning as early as possible, but only when they are exclusively faced with felicitous uses of determiners.
Highlights
Imagine a situation where someone says “The fridge at work is broken”
The experiment reported in the present paper extends the still small empirical basis for answering the following question: Is interpretation driven by presuppositional information encoded in determiners? An advantage of the present study over previous ones is that disambiguation was possible on the determiner itself, and on the noun
The impression is that participants used the determiners to disambiguate sentence meaning, but only when all sentences were used felicitously, that is, in the reliable group. This impression is reflected in area under the curve (AUC), Movement time (MT), and towards target (TTT) measures
Summary
Imagine a situation where someone says “The fridge at work is broken”. There are probably two assumptions you make when hearing this utterance. That there exists a fridge at the workplace of the speaker, and second, that there is exactly one fridge. Presuppositions are background assumptions that speakers of a conversation take to hold. Compare the example with the utterance “A fridge at work is broken.”, that is, with the same utterance containing the indefinite determiner “a”. To the case of the definite determiner, we deduce this based on the fact that indefinite determiners are only felicitously used with non-unique objects. The status of this anti-uniqueness inference is more controversially discussed in the literature. It
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