Processing presuppositions: Dynamic semantics vs pragmatic enrichment

Pragmatic Information in Dynamic Semantics

In 1972, Ernst Ulrich and Christine von Weizsäcker introduced the concept of pragmatic information with three desiderata: (i) Pragmatic information should assess the impact of a message upon its receiver; (ii) Pragmatic information should vanish in the limits of complete (non-interpretable) “novelty” and complete “confirmation”; (iii) Pragmatic information should exhibit non-classical propertie...

The dynamics of pragmatic enrichment during metaphor processing: activation vs. suppression

In this paper, we test between suppression and activation accounts of metaphor processing by means of a novel metaphor interference paradigm that makes use of mouse-tracking. The goal is to understand how context influences the activation of salient and non-salient features of a concept during the on-line processing of a metaphor. In two mouse-tracking experiments, we examine the activation and...

Pragmatic enrichment

The phrase "pragmatic enrichment" is sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to the process in virtue of which the content conveyed by an utterance comes to include all sorts of elements which are contextually implied without being part of what the utterance literally means. In his class notes "Pragmatic Enrichment : Introduction by Examples," Chris Potts gives examples like the following: (1)...

Title of Document : PRAGMATIC ENRICHMENT IN LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND DEVELOPMENT

Title of Document: PRAGMATIC ENRICHMENT IN LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND DEVELOPMENT Shevaun N. Lewis, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Directed By: Professor Colin Phillips Department of Linguistics The goal of language comprehension for humans is not just to decode the semantic content of sentences, but rather to grasp what speakers intend to communicate. To infer speaker meaning, listeners must at minim...

Presuppositions vs. Scalar Implicatures in Aquisition