Journal
LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY
Volume 34, Issue 6, Pages 491-535Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10988-012-9108-y
Keywords
Presuppositions; Attention; Soft triggers; Aboutness; Lexical semantics of verbs; Factivity
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Farias del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000).
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available