Some studies have assumed that prosodic patterns of sentences are exclusively determined by the rules of accented expressions, with deaccenting of non-focused elements playing little or no role [1, 2]. However, many researchers have also recognized the importance of deaccenting rules [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. This paper documents two intonational patterns of Japanese biased questions, ”Rise with Accents...

Van der Sandt’s theory of presuppositions-as-anaphors is widely considered to be the empirically most adequate theory of presupposition projection on the market. One of the main differences between Van der Sandt’s approach and its main competitor, the ‘contextual satisfaction’ approach, lies in the treatment of the so-called partial match phenomenon. In this paper, we take a closer look at part...

The representation of Neg-Raising in the grammar is a matter of controversy. I provide evidence for representing Neg-Raising as a kind of presupposition associated with certain predicates by providing a detailed analysis of NPI-licensing in Neg-Raising contexts. Specific features of presupposition projection are used to explain the licensing of strict NPIs under Neg-Raising predicates. Discussi...

Presuppositions are vital for language comprehension, but little remains known about how they are processed. Using eye tracking in reading, we investigated two issues based on German wieder (’again’). First, we looked at the time course of presupposition processing by testing for processing costs of unsupported presuppositions. Secondly, we tested whether embedding wieder under negation affecte...

The paper discusses two types of exclusive (dis)harmonies in Mandarin. Exclusive-(dis)harmony-A—only is compatible with few but not many, and exclusive-(dis)harmony-B—only is compatible with less than n but not more than n. We suggest Exclusive-(dis)harmony-A can be explained along the lines of Chen 2005. We further propose that Exclusive-disharmony-B can be explained by Maximization failure (F...

Projection is widely used as a diagnostic for presupposition, but many expression types yield projection even though they do not have standard properties of presupposition, for example appositives, expressives, and honorifics (Potts 2005). While it is possible to analyze projection piecemeal, clearly a unitary explanation is to be preferred. Yet we show that standard explanations of projective ...

The shi...de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct constructions. We focus on the remarkable internal properties of the shi...de pattern proper, where both shi and de are present. We concur with a long tradition of scholarship identifying shi...de as a cleft construction, but we show it to have very different properties from itor pseudo-clefts in languages ...

Utterances of counterfactual conditionals are typically attended by the information that their antecedents are false. But there is as yet no account of the source of this information that is both detailed and complete. This paper describes the problem of counterfactual antecedent falsity and argues that the problem can be addressed by appeal to an adequate account of the presuppositions of vari...