The rise and particularly fall of presuppositions: Evidence from duality in universals

Abstract

At the center of this paper is the question whether presuppositions are more likely to be gained or lost in the process of language change. We offer a new experimental method that aims at ascertaining the re-learning speed of potentially presuppositional items based on nonce words and which integrates certain factors of change such as social prestige in an artificial but clearly contextualized set-up. The meaning targeted is of a quantifier meaning ‘both’ with speakers of German and the initial results point to higher ease of losing rather than incorporating the presupposition, but with an interesting resilience after a critical questioning of presuppositional status.