This volume brings together some of the most recent developments in the field of experimental pragmatics, specifically empirical approaches to theoretical issues in presupposition theory. It includes studies of the online processing of presupposed content; investigations of the interpretive properties of presuppositions in various linguistic contexts; comparative perspectives relative to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and implicatures; cross-linguistic comparisons of presupposition triggers; and perspectives from language acquisition. Taken together, these novel contributions provide a snapshot of state-of-the art developments in this area and will serve as a point of reference for numerous emerging avenues of future work. It makes for an ideal set of readings for advanced university courses on experimental studies of meaning and is a must-read for anyone interested in experimental research on meaning in natural language.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Presuppositions in Context - Theoretical Issues and Experimental Perspectives.- 2. Presupposition Processing and Accommodation: An Experiment on wieder ('again') and Consequences for Other Triggers.- 3. Resolving Temporary Referential Ambiguity using Presupposed Content.- 4. Presuppositions vs. Asserted Content in Online Processing.- 5. Presupposition Satisfaction, Locality and Discourse Constituency.- 6. A Cross-linguistic Study of the Non-at-issueness of Exhaustive Inferences.- 7. A Cross-linguistic Study on Information Back grounding and Presupposition Projection.- 8. Weak and Strong Triggers.- 9. Symmetry and Incrementality in Conditionals.- 10. An Experimental Comparison between Presuppositions and Indirect Scalar Implicatures.- 11. Three-year-olds' Understanding of know and think.