Presuppositional and negative islands: a semantic account

Abrusán, Márta

doi:10.1007/s11050-010-9064-4

Cited by 41 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…See Hartman 2012:36). The literature has mostly centered on factive verbs (Zubizarreta 1982;Adams 1985;Rooryck 1992;Abrusán 2011Abrusán , 2014, but the more informative class of verbs to consider is "referential" verbs (Haegeman & Ürögdi 2010a), or presuppositional in our terminology. This is the relevant breakdown, originally proposed to describe adjunct extraction patterns (Cattell 1978;Hegarty 1990): (7) a. non-stance (factive) : regret, know, remember, realize, notice, etc.…”

Section: Presuppositional and Non-presuppositional Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, Abrusán (2011Abrusán ( , 2014 has developed a system that seeks to explain presuppositional and negative islands in terms of the contradictions that might arise during interpretation. Take for example her treatment of "one-time-only" predicates like get.…”

Section: An Alternative: Contrary Islandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But if that were the case, then utterances like the following should be allowed, contrary to fact: (41) * How did Bill deny/admit/verify that John fixed the car? (Abrusán 2011:292) This issue arises because the system in Abrusán (2011Abrusán ( , 2014) needs a certain individual to project the presupposition. That allows for (40).…”

Section: An Alternative: Contrary Islandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

Kastner

2015

Lingua

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Different verbs can take different kinds of arguments. Factive verbs such as remember and forget take clausal complements which are presupposed to be true. In contrast, verbs such as say and think do not presuppose the truth of their complements. I suggest that the complements of presuppositional verbs like remember, forget, admit and deny are actually definite DPs, picking out a discourse referent in the Common Ground. Under this view, factive verbs turn out to be subset of presuppositional verbs, verbs which presuppose the existence of their complement as a proposition in the Common Ground. Factive verbs further require that this proposition be true. It has been established that certain effects arise in clauses embedded by presuppositional verbs: only complements can be extracted from them and argument fronting inside of them is not allowed. I also note that these clauses can have DP pro-forms (which). This stands in opposition to non-presuppositional clauses, where extraction and fronting are possible, and only CP pro-forms (as, so) are allowed. The DP view allows for a uniform solution to these puzzles; the crucial distinction is whether the matrix verb selects for a definite entity (presuppositional) or for a proposition (non-presuppositional). Going further, I introduce crosslinguistic data showing that the entity/proposition split parallels a split in interpretation between DP and CP complements: a presuppositional DP complement is interpreted like a presupposed entity, while a non-presuppositional CP complement has the semantics of a novel proposition. This way of looking at clausal complements also allows us to account for the behavior of sentential subjects, which have been argued to be both nominal and factive. I flesh out these generalizations and show that they emerge as a natural result in our framework. With sentential subjects as with clausal complements, factivity and presupposition correlate with the syntactic category of the argument. I take this to imply a form-meaning isomorphism in the syntax and semantics with regard to what a verb licenses (DP or CP).

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Section: Presuppositional and Non-presuppositional Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Alternative: Contrary Islandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Alternative: Contrary Islandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

Kastner

2015

Lingua

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“…Linguists have observed that if the gap position of a wh-dependency appears within certain syntactic structures, the resulting sentence will be unacceptable (Chomsky 1965;Ross 1967;Chomsky 1973;Huang 1982;and Drawing on the metaphor that the relevant syntactic structures are islands that prevent the whword from moving to the front of the sentence, Ross (1967) called the unacceptability that arises in these constructions island effects and the syntactic constraints that he proposed to capture them island constraints. Though island effects are typically exemplified by wh-dependencies, it should be noted that island effects arise with several different types of long-distance dependencies in human languages, such as relative-clause formation (3), topicalization (4), and adjective-though constructions (5) In the 45 years since island effects were first investigated (Chomsky 1965;Ross 1967), there have been literally hundreds of articles in dozens of languages devoted to the investigation of island effects, resulting in various proposals regarding the nature of island constraints (e.g., Erteschik-Shir 1973;Nishigauchi 1990;Deane 1991;Kluender & Kutas 1993;Szabolcsi & Zwarts 1993;Tsai 1994;Reinhart 1997;Hagstrom 1998;Chomsky 2001;Goldberg 2007;Truswell 2007;Abrusán 2011; and many others), the cross-linguistic variability of island effects (e.g., Engdahl 1980;Huang 1982;Rizzi 1982;Lasnik & Saito 1984;Torrego 1984;Hagstrom 1998), and even the real-time processing of dependencies that contain island effects (e.g., Stowe 1986;Kluender & Kutas 1993;McKinnon & Osterhout 1996;Traxler & Pickering 1996;Phillips 2006, and many others). Though...…”

Section: A Brief Introduction To Syntactic Island Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic Islands and Learning Biases: Combining Experimental Syntax and Computational Modeling to Investigate the Language Acquisition Problem

Pearl

Sprouse

2013

Language Acquisition

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“…Finally, it seems that some modals can improve the acceptability of wh-islands, at least in certain, highly specific contexts. These cases pattern together with other examples of weak islands that have been shown recently to be sensitive to similar effects of modal obviation: negative islands (Fox & Hackl 2007) and presuppositional islands (Abrusán 2011). Fox & Hackl (2007) have argued that the unacceptability of negative degree islands such as *How fast didn't Bill drive?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 66%