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This paper presents two experimental studies investigating the processing of presupposed content. Both studies employ the German additive particle auch (too). In the first study, participants were given a questionnaire containing bi-clausal, ambiguous sentences with 'auch' in the second clause. The presupposition introduced by auch was only satisfied on one of the two readings of the sentence, and this reading corresponded to a syntactically dispreferred parse of the sentence. The prospect of having the auch-presupposition satisfied made participants choose this syntactically dispreferred reading more frequently than in a control condition. The second study used the self-paced-reading paradigm and compared the reading times on clauses containing auch, which differed in whether the presupposition of auch was satisfied or not. Participants read the clause more slowly when the presupposition was not satisfied. It is argued that the two studies show that presuppositions play an important role in online sentence comprehension and affect the choice of syntactic analysis. Some theoretical implications of these findings for semantic theory and dynamic accounts of presuppositions as well as for theories of semantic processing are discussed.
The expressions few and a few are typically considered to be separate quantifiers. I challenge this assumption, showing that with the appropriate definition of few, a few can be derived compositionally as a + few. The core of the analysis is a proposal that few has a denotation as a one-place predicate which incorporates a negation operator. From this, argument interpretations can be derived for expressions such as few students and a few students, differing only in the scope of negation. I show that this approach adequately captures the interpretive differences between few and a few. I further show that other such pairs are blocked by a constraint against the vacuous application of a.
What role does language play in the development of numerical cognition? In the present paper I argue that the evolution of symbolic thinking (as a basis for language) laid the grounds for the emergence of a systematic concept of number. This concept is grounded in the notion of an infinite sequence and encompasses number assignments that can focus on cardinal aspects ("three pencils"), ordinal aspects ("the third runner"), and even nominal aspects ("bus #3"). I show that these number assignments are based on a specific association of relational structures, and that it is the human language faculty that provides a cognitive paradigm for such an association, suggesting that language played a pivotal role in the evolution of systematic numerical cognition.
In linguistics and the philosophy of language, the mass/count distinction has traditionally been regarded as a bi-partition on the nominal domain, where typical instances are nouns like "beef" (mass) vs."cow" (count). In the present paper, we argue that this partition reveals a system that is based on both syntactic features and conceptual features, and present experimental evidence suggesting that the discrimination of the two kinds of features has a psychological reality.