Linguistic Presuppositions Research Articles

Text in psycholinguistics

The article gives the insight into the notion of “text” via “prism” of linguistic and psycholinguistic parameters and presents its “broad” and “narrow” interpretation in humanities. It is pointed out that the linguistic parameters of the text include its in-tegrity, coherence, and boundary structuring, while psycholinguistic definitions focus on emotions and creativity of the sender and addressee. The psychological aspects and stages of text creation are analyzed with reference to knowledge of its background and linguistic presupposition. The contribution of Ukrainian and foreign studies to the development of the psycholinguistic foundations of the text are discussed on the basis of examples from Ukrainian literature. It is proved that the interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the text is crucial for text study; the peculiarities of text creation are characterized through the opposition “generation – perception”, as well as through the expression of the linguistic personality of its ego in the text. The positive and negative impact of the text on the recipient is highlighted as well as it gives up-to-date interpretation of such notions as pathological text, apperception, understanding, interpretational variability of the text. The phenomenon of linguistic and psycho-accentuation is being analyzed on the basis of the texts of Ukrainian distinguished writers (P. Kulish, O. Kobylyanska, I. Ogienko, and others). The author characterizes the influence of linguistic and extralinguistic factors on increasing psycholinguistic accentuation.

How does philosophy learn to speak a new language?

ABSTRACT How does philosophy learn to speak a new language? That is, how does some particular language come to serve as the means for the expression of philosophical ideas? In this paper, I present an answer grounded in four historical case studies and suggest that this answer has broad implications for contemporary philosophy. I begin with Jonathan Rée’s account of philosophical translation into English in the sixteenth century, and the debate between philosopher-translators who wanted to acquire – wholesale or with modifications – foreign terms, and those who wished to take existing words and transform them from their ordinary to a philosophical use. I sketch how these twin processes of ‘acquisition’ and ‘transformation’ manifested themselves in philosophical translations from Greek to Latin, Greek to Arabic and both Greek and Arabic to Gə’əz and argue that comparative work in this vein could yield interesting and significant results. I suggest that not only is Rée’s approach useful for thinking about philosophical translation historically, but that philosophical translation between very different languages is important for contemporary philosophy insofar as it reveals the linguistic presuppositions of philosophical theories expressed in some particular language, and that this constitutes an argument against the prevailing monolingualism in philosophy.

Presupposition, attention and cognitive load

The paper deals with the relation between linguistic presupposition and epistemic vigilance. It proposes evolutionary and cognitive reasons why presuppositions should induce shallower processing, that proves effective in persuasion and manipulation. It shows examples of presuppositions being associated with reduced critical attention from commercial advertising and political propaganda. It summarizes the available experimental verification of this assumption, commenting on the fact that behavioural evidence confirms reduced attention for presupposed contents, while neurophysiological evidence, on the contrary, shows increased processing effort. An explanation for the apparent contradiction is proposed, namely that the measured effort accounts for the mismatch between the cognitive and contextual status of new information and its being linguistically presented as presupposed. The fact that processing resources are devoted to repairing the mentioned mismatch is seen as further reducing the attentional resources available for epistemic vigilance and critical evaluation.

On the Nature of Presupposition: A Normative Speech Act Account

In this paper I provide a new account of linguistic presuppositions, on which they are ancillary speech acts defined by constitutive norms. After providing an initial intuitive characterization of the phenomenon, I present a normative speech act account of presupposition in parallel with Williamson’s analogous account of assertion. I explain how it deals well with the problem of informative presuppositions, and how it relates to accounts for the Triggering and Projection Problems for presuppositions. I conclude with a brief discussion of the consequences of the proposal for the adequacy of Williamson’s account of assertion.

Presuppositions as conversational phenomena

In this paper, I distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic presuppositions. I also propose that we should be interested in conversational presuppositions, which could also be called speaker-meant presuppositions or speaker's presuppositions. I also distinguish between potential and actual presuppositions. I propose that, in some cases, presuppositions can be conversationally implicated and cancellation is possible. I specify what the hard cases are and I try to explain them through ontological considerations. I try to reduce the hard cases through (a) the notion that all actual presuppositions are speaker-meant; (b) the distinction between ontological and linguistic presuppositions; and (c) the uncontroversial notion that even ontological presuppositions are susceptible to semantic under-determination that has to be tackled though pragmatic intrusion. Pragmatic intrusion for presuppositional cases, however, cannot really amount to completing or expanding or in any case computing an explicature in an ordinary sense, as explicatures have to do with truth-conditions and aim to create propositionally complete forms that are truth-evaluable, unlike propositional fragments or schemata that are usually expressed in sentences (Carston, 2002; Wilson and Sperber, 2002, 2012). They are processes similar to explicatures, but since presuppositions are only pre-conditions for an utterance's being true or false (Strawson, 1950; Macagno; 2016; Green, 1989; Marmaridou, 2000), we cannot say that these processes are completely like those of explicatures. Nevertheless, they are pragmatically-motivated, even if hard to cancel. (See Capone, 2009 on lack of cancellability or Jaszczolt, 2016 on entrenched meanings.) This more or less brings my approach in line with contextualism (even if I accept semantic invariantism, along the lines of Kratzer, 2012 or Cappelen and Lepore, 2005 (Invariantism is also shared by Carston (2002), in a form that is compatible with her contextualism.)).

Metáfora e gramática: a categorização de um fenômeno multifacetado

Este trabalho pretende fazer uma revisão do tratamento dado à metáfora nas gramáticas tradicionais, de cunho normativista, e nas gramáticas contemporâneas, que se pretendem descritivistas. Esta revisão se baseia no pressuposto linguístico de que a metáfora não é um uso especial da linguagem, mas um mecanismo linguístico disponível e utilizado pelos falantes o tempo todo. Desta forma, investigamos o surgimento da metáfora dentro dos estudos gramaticais e a parca modificação da abordagem deste fenômeno ao longo dos tempos. Como dissemos, entendemos que a metáfora não faz parte de uma classe gramatical específica – e nem faria sentido pensar desta forma – e, assim, este trabalho olha para as categorizações disponíveis a fim de propor uma nova maneira de tratá-la, mais condizente com o rumo seguido pela linguística moderna.

Xunzi’s View on Rectifying Names and the Linguistic Presupposition

Xunzi’s View on Rectifying Names and the Linguistic Presupposition

Processing presuppositions: Dynamic semantics vs pragmatic enrichment

One defining and yet puzzling feature of linguistic presuppositions is the way they interact with linguistic operators. For instance, when a presupposition trigger (e.g., realise) occurs under negation (e.g., Zoologists do not realise that elephants are mammals), the sentence is most commonly interpreted with the same global presupposition (elephants are mammals) as if negation was not present. Alternatively, the presupposition may be locally accommodated, i.e., the presupposition may become part of what is negated. In this paper, we develop and test two processing accounts of presupposition projection, the global-first model and the local-first model, inspired by dynamic semantics and pragmatic theories respectively. We tested these predictions using a verification task similar to Bott and Noveck's test of default models of scalar implicature. Across two experiments, using different materials and instructions, participants were faster to derive the global interpretation than the local interpretation, in contrast to the local-first model. We discuss the results in terms of dynamic semantics vs pragmatic models of presupposition projection.

Этноязыковые хорватско-норвежские параллели

История каждого языка по-своему уникальна и разнообразна. В разнообразии культуры и истории различных народов коренятся факторы, определяющие своеобразие их литературных (стандартных) языков. Во многом существенны исторические условия, в которых формировались и в дальнейшем функционировали национальные литературные языки.Обычно лингвисты сопоставляют типологически сходные близкородственные языки, в статье же предпринята попытка кратко описать параллельное этноязыковое становление относительно далеких в генеалогическом отношении литературныхязыков: хорватского и норвежского. Хорватский язык относят к южнославянской группе языков, тогда как норвежский — к скандинавской группе германских языков.

Effects of presupposition on deductive reasoning

This paper examines the effect of linguistic presupposition on the solving of three-term series problems. Subjects were presented with problems differing both in form (i.e., same adjective in the two premises versus antonymous adjectives in the two premises) and in the type of adjective contained in the premises (e.g., extreme versus regular). An interaction in problem difficulty between problem form and adjective degree suggested that the representation of the presuppositional information contained in the premises of some problems may conflict with the unified representation of the ordering of the items, or make the latter integration process itself more difficult. For both the regular and extreme adjective pairs, problems were also more difficult when they contained an adjective from the (−) pole of an adjectival dimension (e.g., bad, wicked) as opposed to the (+) pole of the same dimension (e.g., good, saintly), with this difference being especially pronounced for those adjectival dimensions which described an ordinal as opposed to a ratio scale. The implications of this general (−) pole-(+) pole difference in difficulty for previously proposed explanations of the more specific marked-unmarked difference in difficulty are discussed.