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The Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP) requires that epistemic modals take wider scope than strong quantifiers such as every or most (von Fintel and Iatridou, 2003). Although fairly robust in its realization, a few systemic classes of counterexamples to the ECP have been noted. Based on these, previous work has argued for two claims: subjective modals obey the ECP, whereas objective ones don’t (Tancredi, 2007; Anand and Hacquard, 2008); and every respects the ECP, whereas each violates it (Tancredi, 2007). This paper argues that explicit Questions Under Discussion (QUDs; Roberts, 1996; Ginzburg, 1996) also systematically influence the ECP: scopal orderings that provide relevant answers to the given QUDs are preferred, and this tendency can override the ECP. To support this claim, the paper presents an experimental study. The results corroborate the existence of systematic QUD effects on the ECP, and support the view that the ECP is derived from a confluence of various pragmatic and lexical biases.
This paper experimentally investigates presupposition projection from the scope of the quantifiers every and at least one, as triggered by the factive verb be aware and the iterative adverb again.
The first issue we are concerned with is whether presuppositions project universally or existentially from quantified sentences. Different theoretical accounts endorse opposing views here (e.g., Heim, 1983; Geurts, 1999; Beaver, 2001; Schlenker, 2008, 2009; Fox, 2012), while recent experimental work (Chemla, 2009; Tiemann, 2014) suggests that the force of the projected presupposition varies by quantifier.
The second issue we look at is how the descriptively observed readings arise—in particular, as a direct result output from the projection mechanism, or via additional, independent mechanisms such as domain restriction (e.g., Geurts and van Tiel, 2016): if the domain of the quantifier is restricted, this can yield what looks like non-universal inferences in light of the overall, unrestricted domain, even if the projection mechanism itself yields a universal presupposition. Finally, we test whether the presupposed content also forms part of the entailed content, at least for certain triggers (Sudo, 2012; Klinedinst, 2016; Zehr and Schwarz, 2016).
Our results yield clearly different patterns for every and at least one, with every giving rise to universal presuppositions, which, to a very limited extent, can be weakened by domain restriction, and at least one overwhelmingly giving rise to non-universal presuppositions. Our results also indicate the availability of presupposition-less readings for both triggers in the task at hand, apparently more prevalent than domain restriction. Thereby, we present novel evidence that helps to pinpoint which of the theoretical options can be substantiated experimentally.