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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.
In this paper, focusing on the relevance-theoretic view of cognition, I discuss the idea that what is communicated through an utterance is not merely an explicature upon which implicature(s) are recovered, but rather a propositional complex that contains both explicit and implicit information. More specifically, I propose that this information is constructed on the fly as the interpreter processes every lexical item in its turn while parsing the utterance in real time, in this way creating a string of ad hoc concepts. While hearing an utterance and incrementally constructing a context, the propositional complex communicated by an utterance is pragmatically narrowed and simultaneously pragmatically broadened in order to incorporate only the set of optimally relevant propositions with respect to a specific point in the interpretation. The narrowing of propositions from the initial context at each stage allows relevant propositions to be carried on to the new level, while their broadening adds to the communicated propositional complex new propositions that are linked to the lexical item that is processed at every step of the interpretation process.