TY - JOUR TI - Presupposition Projection in Online Processing AU - Schwarz, Florian AU - Tiemann, Sonja T2 - Journal of Semantics AB - A central aspect of language comprehension is that hearers integrate incoming linguistic content both with the rest of the current sentence and the larger discourse context. Presuppositions crucially interact with both intra- and inter-sentential context in intricate ways, which makes their study especially useful in this regard. We present a series of experiments investigating the time-course of interpreting presuppositions in online comprehension and the impact that so-called presupposition projection has on this in cases where presuppositions appear in embedded environments. We find immediate delays in eye tracking reading times when the presupposition of German wieder (‘again’) is not supported by the context, but only for unembedded occurrences of wieder. Further evidence from a rating experiment and a stops-making-sense study supports our interpretation of this result to the effect that global presuppositions of embedded presupposition triggers are not immediately available in processing. A second reading time experiment explores the effects of embedding further by providing presuppositional support in different locations in contexts with a more complex structure involving conditionals. We find longer reading times when the support is more distant, measured in terms of the number of projection steps posited by Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). Altogether, the results suggest that presupposition projection is a cognitively effortful process, and are thus consistent with theoretical accounts that reflect this in terms of the complexity of the representations involved in the different types of contexts, while other accounts that are more neutral in this regard need to be supplemented by additional assumptions or alternative explanations for the observed effects. On the more general level of discourse processing models, these results suggest that there is even more structure relevant to cognitive processes at a level between the surface representation and the purely semantic level (e.g. the commonly assumed level of a text-base) than previously assumed. DA - 2017/02/01/ PY - 2017 DO - 10.1093/jos/ffw005 DP - academic.oup.com VL - 34 IS - 1 SP - 61 EP - 106 J2 - J Semant LA - en SN - 0167-5133 UR - https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/34/1/61/2555468 Y2 - 2020/05/08/18:45:19 KW - NSF-BCS-1349009 ER -