[PLing] talks Panizza, Thalmann, March 26, 2.15

[Viola Schmitt]

Dear all,

on Tuesday, March 26, our project `Conjunction and disjunction from a 
typological perspective' will host two talks:

2.15 pm: Daniele Panizza (University of Göttingen)
Title: `The Nörten-Hardenberg school children conspiracy in the 
Neo-Gricean Paradise”. On the processing and interpretation of indirect 
scalar implicatures in children and adults.' -- see below for abstract

3.15 pm: Maik Thalmann (University of Göttingen)
Title: `Presuppositions At-Issue: Soft and Hard Triggers in Language 
Acquisition' (Joint work with Yuqiu Chen and Mailin Antomo)
-- see below for abstract


Both talks will take place at Seminarraum II, Germanistik (2 ZG -here is 
how you get there: 
https://www.univie.ac.at/konjunktion/wegbeschreibung.html).

Everyone is cordinally invited (of course),

Viola Schmitt (+ the other members of the project)



Abstract Panizza
Daniele Panizza (Göttingen)
`The Nörten-Hardenberg school children conspiracy in the Neo-Gricean 
Paradise”. On the processing and interpretation of indirect scalar 
implicatures in children and adults.'

We report on a set of four experiments involving offline semantic 
judgment and online eye-tracking ambiguity resolution of sentences 
including indirect Scalar Implicature triggers (i.e. not all -> some) 
such as (1):

(1)
Der Kapitän hat nicht mit allen Meerjungfrauen getanzt.
The captain has not with all mermaids danced

A first set of experiments implementing unbiased prosody surprisingly 
showed that younger children (i.e. 6 year old) were faster in 
identifying the target of sentence (1) as compared to adults. A second 
set of experiments, in which the critical sentences were recorded with 
natural intonation, will shed light on the nature of the results of the 
first study, and tell whether it is the comprehension and processing of 
intonation, as compared to other factors, the potential culprit of the 
apparently unexplainable pattern of results of the first study.


Abstract Thalmann
`Presuppositions At-Issue: Soft and Hard Triggers in Language 
Acquisition' (Joint work with Yuqiu Chen and Mailin Antomo)

Classically, the term presupposition was used to describe expressions 
that have rather homogeneous properties. More recently, however, a 
number of tests, among them felicity in epistemically deficient 
contexts, gave rise to a dichotomous subdivision into hard and soft 
presupposition triggers,

This sensitivity to explicit ignorance is closely related to Question 
Under Discussion (QUD) considerations and at-issueness, the latter of 
which has been implicated in being predictive of projection behavior 
(Xue & Onea 2011) and to affect presuppositions’ felicity (Aravind & 
Hackl 2017) since presuppositions instantiate backgrounded utterance 
components. The present work seeks to investigate the following research 
questions in this regard: (i) is the above two-way split more of a 
continuum (Tonhauser, Beaver & Degen 2018), (ii) can we disentangle 
presuppositionality and at- issueness constraints, and (iii) are there 
reflexes in how children acquire or judge different triggers?

The interim test results among German adult and child speakers show that 
at a descriptive level, backgroundedness and presuppositional status, 
while overlapping, need to be distinguished. Also, there is consistent 
variability between soft and hard triggers as well as different triggers 
within one category. Further, 4-to-6 year old children, although being 
sensitive to some of those contrasts, struggle with at-issue 
backgrounded content generally, while adults are very reluctant to 
accept hard triggers (and non restrictive relative clauses) but respond 
well to soft triggers when backgroundedness is violated.