Presupposition projection from the scope of None: Universal, existential, or both?

Abstract

The nature of presupposition projection from the scope of quantificational expressions, particularly negative ones, continues to be both theoretically and empirically controversial. We experimentally investigate the interpretation of sentences like None of the bears won the race, which could in principle be associated with three projection options, giving rise to: an existential reading, on which at least one of the bears participated and none won; a universal reading, on which all of the bears participated and none won; and a presuppositionless reading on which none of the bears both participated and won. We used a covered box task to investigate English-speaking adults' and children's interpretations of such sentences. The results from the adult participants provide empirical evidence for all three readings; the results from the child participants, however, reveal no evidence for the existential reading. We discuss our results in light of competing theoretical accounts, focusing on options for reconciling the theories with the experimental data from both adults and children.

Presupposition Projection from the Scope of Quantifiers in Mandarin Chinese

“…The results from my experiment largely correspond with [4] experimental results, with the "all" presupposition showing a very high percentage of indication in universal-existential presupposition reading but low in others. It is also very surprising to see that 11 out of more than 40 participant responses were excluded from data analysis.…”

“…A few previous studies have already investigated experimentally presuppositions projections across quantifier but mostly in English [1] [2] [3] [4]. In this section, we will closely examine three papers and their results.…”

“…To do so, I created a survey to analyze the effect of those three quantifiers on presupposition projection. In this paper, section 2 introduces some background on presuppositions, section 3 reviews previous studies, section 4 explains the design of the paper, section 5 examines the results. The last section is a conclusion of the paper and the results.…”

The computation and suspension of presuppositions by L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers

“…The method adopted in this experiment was the covered-box paradigm developed by Huang et al (2013), which has been successfully used in exploring implicatures (Huang et al, 2013) and presuppositions (Romoli and Schwarz, 2015; Schwarz, 2014; Zehr et al, 2016). The covered-box paradigm includes one picture hidden under a black, covered box (Figure 4, right).…”

Asymmetries Between Direct and Indirect Scalar Implicatures in Second Language Acquisition

“…The method used in this experiment was the covered box paradigm (Huang et al, 2013), as discussed in Section 2. This paradigm has been successfully applied to explore implicatures (Huang et al, 2013) and presuppositions (Schwarz, 2014; Zehr et al, 2016; Romoli and Schwarz, 2015), especially regarding suspension of an inference. Compared to a traditional picture-selecting task, the difference with the covered box paradigm is that it includes a covered box (see the invisible or the hidden picture on the right in Figure 3).…”