Experimenting with the king of France: Topics, verifiability and definite descriptions

Abstract

Definite descriptions with reference failure have been argued to give rise to different truth-value intuitions depending on the local linguistic context in which they appear. We conducted an experiment to investigate these alleged differences, thereby contributing new data to the debate. We have found that pragmatic strategies dependent on verification and topicalisation, suggested in the context of trivalent/partial theories, indeed play a role in people's subjective judgments. We discuss the consequences of these findings for all major approaches to definite descriptions (i.e. Russellian, Strawsonian, pragmatic). Finally, we offer a discussion of the relative contribution of verificational and topicality effects on truth values, reaching the conclusion that verification is primarily relevant and topicality is dependent on that. We thus support von Fintel's (2004) position on the primacy of verification, but not his dismissal of topicality as a factor.

Two methods to find truth-value gaps and their application to the projection problem of homogeneity

“…• Abrusán and Szendrői (2013) asked people to judge sentences with non-referring definites (e. g., "The king of France is bald" and "The king of France is not married to Carla Bruni") and gave them three options: true, false, and can't say. They obtained interesting results, but participants did not make much use of the third option.…”

That’s not quite it: An experimental investigation of (non‑)exhaustivity in clefts

“…We extend such experimental methods here to two classes of (alleged) definite expressions, namely definite pseudoclefts and cleft sentences. Although experimental studies with presupposition contradiction are few, the above studies have in fact found that such sentences result in a majority of 'false' judgments (despite a 'can't say' option) (Abrusán & Szendrői 2013) and broad rejections (e.g., by selecting the covered box) (Romoli & Schwarz 2015). Moreover, verification and falsification experiments give rise to categorical judgments, which should in principle allow for an easier identification of non-gradient differences between the two target structures at hand.…”

Metalinguistic negation from an informational perspective

“…There is no clearly identifiable corrected segment in the following, where the existence of a referent, and the responsibility for an action are concerned respectively. It could be assumed in these cases that it is the clause as a whole that is in Focus, in which case the opportunity is lost to note explicitly that it was also discourse-old (for the role of Topichood for the King of France cases, see Brandtler 2006;Abrusán & Szendrői 2013). Here, it might be useful to explore how such sequences are dealt with in overt Focus marking languages.…”