Uniqueness Presupposition Research Articles

Processing references in context: when the polar bear does not meet a polar bear

Discourse understanding is hampered when missing or conflicting context information is given. In four experiments, we investigated what happens (a) when the definite determiner “the,” which presupposes existence and uniqueness, does not find a unique referent in the context or (b) when the appropriate use of the indefinite determiner is violated by the presence of a unique referent (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2). To focus on the time-course of processing the uniqueness presupposition of the definite determiner, we embedded the determiner in different sentence structures and varied the context (Experiment 3 and Experiment 4). Reading time served as an index of processing difficulty in a word-by-word self-paced reading task and acceptability judgments provided hints for a possible repair of a presupposition violation. Our results showed that conflicting and missing context information lowered acceptability ratings and was associated with prolonged reading times. The pattern of results differed depending on the nature of the presupposition (Experiments 1 and 2) and whether supplementing missing context information was possible (Experiment 3 and Experiment 4). Our findings suggest that different cognitive processes come into play when interpreting presuppositions in order to get a meaningful interpretation of a discourse.

A higher-order plurality solution to Xiang's (2021) puzzle

Xiang (2021) notes the following puzzle: plural wh-questions involving certain collective predicates are predicted to carry a uniqueness presupposition (Dayal 1996), yet intuitively they don’t (cf. Gentile & Schwarz 2020). She proposes that such questions have ‘higher-order readings’ (Spector 2007, 2008), and crucially that they have answers naming boolean conjunctions. I show that for the data she considers, recourse to higher-order question readings is mistaken: Xiang’s puzzle should be solved with higher-order plurality, and I provide empirical justification for this approach, mirroring for questions the recent findings for declaratives by Buccola, Kuhn & Nicolas (2021).

Decomposing definiteness: Evidence from Chuj

AbstractThis article explores the realization of definiteness in Chuj, an underdocumented Mayan language. I show that Chuj provides support for recent theories that distinguish betweenweakandstrongdefinite descriptions (e.g., Schwarz 2009, 2013; Arkoh and Matthewson 2013; Hanink 2018; Jenks 2018). A set of morphemes called “noun classifiers” contribute a uniqueness presupposition, composing directly with nominals to form weak definites. To form strong definites, I show that two pieces are required: (i) the noun classifier, which again contributes a uniqueness presupposition, and (ii) extra morphology that contributes an anaphoricity presupposition. Chuj strong definites thus provide explicit evidence for a decompositional account of weak and strong definites, as also advocated in Hanink 2018. I then extend this analysis to third person pronouns, which are realized in Chuj with bare classifiers, and which I propose come in two guises depending on their use. On the one hand, based on previous work (Postal 1966, Cooper 1979, Heim 1990), I argue that classifier pronouns can sometimes be E-type pronouns: weak definite determiners which combine with a covert index-introducing predicate. In such cases, classifier pronouns represent a strong definite description. On the other hand, I argue, based on diagnostics established in Bi and Jenks 2019, that Chuj classifier pronouns sometimes arise as a result of NP ellipsis (Elbourne 2001, 2005). In such cases, classifier pronouns reflect a weak definite description.

Who and What DoWhoandWhatRange Over Cross-Linguistically?

AbstractDayal’s (1996) account of the presuppositions of wh-questions makes faulty predictions for languages which draw number distinctions in the domain of simplex wh-expressions: (Dayal, 1996) predicts that a singular wh-expression should always give rise to a Uniqueness Presupposition; the Anti-Singleton Inference associated with its plural counterpart is expected to be parasitic on the uniqueness presupposition. Using data from Spanish, Greek, and Hungarian, where simplex wh-expressions inflect for number, we claim that singular simplex wh-expressions do not give rise to a Uniqueness Presupposition, but plural simplex wh-expressions nonetheless give rise to an Anti-Singleton Inference. We provide an analysis of these facts that is consistent with Dayal’s (1996) account of constituent questions, by assigning simplex wh-expressions a type-ambiguous denotation.

QUINE’S PROXY-FUNCTION ARGUMENT FOR THE INDETERMINACY OF REFERENCE AND FREGE’S CAESAR PROBLEM

In his logical foundation of arithmetic, Frege faced the problem that the semantic interpretation of his system does not determine the reference of the abstract terms completely. The contextual definition of number, for instance, does not decide whether the number 5 is identical to Julius Caesar. In a late writing, Quine claimed that the indeterminacy of reference established by Frege’s Caesar problem is a special case of the indeterminacy established by his proxy-function argument. The present paper aims to show that Frege’s Caesar problem does not really support the conclusions that Quine draws from the proxy-function argument. On the contrary, it reveals that Quine’s argument is a non sequitur: it does not establish that there are alternative interpretations of our terms that are equally correct, but only that these terms are ambiguous. The latter kind of referential indeterminacy implies that almost all sentences of our overall theory of the world are either false or neither true nor false, because they contain definite descriptions whose uniqueness presupposition is not fulfilled. The proxy-function argument must therefore be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of Quine’s behaviorist premise that the reference of terms is determined only by our linguistic behavior.

High and low uniqueness in singular wh-interrogatives

While simple singular wh-interrogatives carry a uniqueness presupposition, this is not so when they contain possibility modals. Hirsch & Schwarz (2019) account for this contrast by assuming (i) that questions can have multiple maximally informative true answers and (ii) that uniqueness is triggered lexically inside the scope of interrogative. We show that their proposal overgenerates on two accounts. Firstly, it predicts too weak a presupposition for modalized interrogatives. Secondly, it predicts unattested interpretations for interrogatives containing negation. We show that both issues can be solved using exhaustification operators. On the one hand, we obtain the desired presupposition for modalized interrogatives by assuming the lexical trigger for uniqueness to be a presuppositional variant of an exhaustification operator (Bassi, Del Pinal & Sauerland 2019). On the other, we show that unattested readings of negation can be blocked by assuming that questions presuppose that the pointwise exhaustification of their answers partitions the context of evaluation (Fox 2019). We argue that proper empirical coverage for singular wh-interrogatives requires the interaction of both exhaustification operations.

Presuppositions of determiners are immediately used to disambiguate utterance meaning: A mouse-tracking study on the German language

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.

A within-subjects comparison of the acquisition of quantity-related inferences

This study directly compares quantity inferences from scalar implicatures (‘Some of the ducks are black’) and uniqueness presuppositions in definites (‘the duck is black’) to exhaustivity inferences in English it-clefts (‘It’s the duck that’s black’) for which the theoretical literature disagrees on the source of inference – pragmatic (like scalar implicatures), or semantic (like presuppositions). We investigate whether within-subjects correlations in acquisition can inform us about the source of exhaustivity inferences. Assuming comprehension is achieved once the necessary basis for meaning is acquired, it-clefts should pattern with presupposition judgments if computing a presupposition is involved and should pattern with scalar implicature judgments if computing an implicature is involved. We conduct three experiments to test how closely it-cleft judgments pattern with other quantityrelated inferences, keeping materials maximally similar. The first two experiments test adult participants using a Truth Value Judgment Task and then a 3-point Rating Task; we find that adults’ response patterns to under-informative uses of these constructions differ both across individuals and across inference types, with the Rating Task giving more informative results. In the third experiment, we use the 3-point Rating Task with 4-, 5-, and 6- year olds to characterize response patterns across the three inference types for each individual subject. We find that the individual response patterns children exhibit are consistent with the theory that it-cleft exhaustivity shares an underlying cognitive source with the computation of presupposition inferences, but not with scalar implicature inferences.

Singular which, mention-some, and variable scope uniqueness

Singular wh-questions carry a uniqueness presupposition. Dayal (1996) proposed that uniqueness is triggered by an answer operator (ANS), which occurs highest in the question LF, outside the question nucleus. We observe data which we take to show that uniqueness may be triggered at a low scope site, beneath operators which themselves are within the question nucleus. In response to these “low uniqueness” cases, we remove the uniqueness presupposition from ANS, and suggest re-localizing it to the wh itself, which can reconstruct into the question nucleus to take narrow scope. This paves the way for a weakening of ANS previously suggested in Fox (2013) to accommodate mention-some questions.

Definiteness projection

We argue that definite noun phrases give rise to uniqueness inferences characterized by a pattern we call definiteness projection. Definiteness projection says that the uniqueness inference of a definite projects out unless there is an indefinite antecedent in a position that filters presuppositions. We argue that definiteness projection poses a serious puzzle for e-type theories of (in)definites; on such theories, indefinites should filter existence presuppositions but not uniqueness presuppositions. We argue that definiteness projection also poses challenges for dynamic approaches, which have trouble generating uniqueness inferences and predicting some filtering behavior, though unlike the challenge for e-type theories, these challenges have mostly been noted in the literature, albeit in a piecemeal way. Our central aim, however, is not to argue for or against a particular view, but rather to formulate and motivate a generalization about definiteness which any adequate theory must account for.

Definiteness and determinacy

This paper distinguishes between definiteness and determinacy. Definiteness is seen as a morphological category which, in English, marks a (weak) uniqueness presupposition, while determinacy consists in denoting an individual. Definite descriptions are argued to be fundamentally predicative, presupposing uniqueness but not existence, and to acquire existential import through general type-shifting operations that apply not only to definites, but also indefinites and possessives. Through these shifts, argumental definite descriptions may become either determinate (and thus denote an individual) or indeterminate (functioning as an existential quantifier). The latter option is observed in examples like ‘Anna didn’t give the only invited talk at the conference’, which, on its indeterminate reading, implies that there is nothing in the extension of ‘only invited talk at the conference’. The paper also offers a resolution of the issue of whether possessives are inherently indefinite or definite, suggesting that, like indefinites, they do not mark definiteness lexically, but like definites, they typically yield determinate readings due to a general preference for the shifting operation that produces them.

Weak Uniqueness: The Only Difference Between Definites and Indefinites

We argue that predicative the is an identity function that is defined for predicates that satisfy weak uniqueness: if there is an F, then there is only one. Predicative definites do not presuppose existence, as evidenced by anti-uniqueness effects, for example the fact that ‘Scott is not the only author of Waverley’ implies that there is more than one author of Waverley. Separating the uniqueness and existence components of definites brings definites and indefinites closer together: The definite and indefinite articles are both argued to be identity functions on predicates, differing only in that the latter lacks the weak uniqueness presupposition. Furthermore, the meaning of argumental definites and indefinites can be derived from the predicative meanings using the same general mechanisms that introduce existence. Existence is generally at-issue with argumental indefinites and presupposed with argumental definites. However, we observe that anti-uniqueness effects arise with argumental definites as well, under conditions described in our ‘Dependence Generalization’. We take this to show that existence can be at-issue with argumental definites, and we derive the Dependence Generalization in terms of relevance to the question under discussion.

Back to uniqueness presupposition

While it is usually assumed that definite descriptions presuppose the existence and the uniqueness for their referent, there are lots of counter-examples, in which either the existence or the uniqueness isn’t presupposed. Among them are weak definites, which can be divided into two classes: (i) the short weak definites such as the train in the VP take the train and (ii) the long weak definites such as the student of a linguist in the sentence this data comes from the student of a linguist. A unified analysis of these two classes is proposed, based on the claim that nouns in weak definite descriptions refer to types and that the definite determiner triggers only a weak uniqueness presupposition, in wich the uniqueness depends on the existence.

Familiarity constraints on weak definite DPS

Weak definite DPs have been characterized as definite DPs lacking the uniqueness presupposition usually associated with the definite determiner and suffering distributional restrictions that depend on the lexical information conveyed by the NP and on the prototypicality of the activity denoted by the VP. This paper tackles the latter issue. We propose a unified analysis of the definite determiner, by which the determiner conveys a presupposition of uniqueness and of familiarity also in weak DPs. Appealing to the notion of weak familiarity (Roberts 2003), we can thus account for prototypicality restrictions, which turn out to depend on the accessibility of familiar situations in a conversational or conventional background.

Weak Uniqueness: The Only Difference Between Definites and Indefinites

We argue that predicative the is an identity function that is defined for predicates that satisfy weak uniqueness: if there is an F, then there is only one. Predicative definites do not presuppose existence, as evidenced by anti-uniqueness effects, for example the fact that ‘Scott is not the only author of Waverley’ implies that there is more than one author of Waverley. Separating the uniqueness and existence components of definites brings definites and indefinites closer together: The definite and indefinite articles are both argued to be identity functions on predicates, differing only in that the latter lacks the weak uniqueness presupposition. Furthermore, the meaning of argumental definites and indefinites can be derived from the predicative meanings using the same general mechanisms that introduce existence. Existence is generally at-issue with argumental indefinites and presupposed with argumental definites. However, we observe that anti-uniqueness effects arise with argumental definites as well, under conditions described in our ‘Dependence Generalization’. We take this to show that existence can be at-issue with argumental definites, and we derive the Dependence Generalization in terms of relevance to the question under discussion.

The deconstruction of Chinese shì…de clefts revisited

The article presents an analysis of Chinese cleft sentences. Building on work conducted in the past decade, this work sets out to present a new account of Chinese cleft sentences in terms of overt movement, output-oriented linearization constraints and a presuppositional uniqueness requirement on events. I present a syntactic proposal which leads to an overt bipartition of cleft focus phrases and cleft presuppositions in syntax, mediated by the functional element de. The compositional semantic implementation of Chinese clefts derives the exhaustiveness associated with this pattern from a presuppositional uniqueness condition on events. This renders the exhaustiveness tied to Chinese clefts maximally similar to the uniqueness presupposition of definite determiners.