TY - GEN A1 - Berger, Frauke A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Restrictions on addition BT - children’s interpretation of the focus particles auch ‘ also ’ and nur ‘ only ’ in German T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Children up to school age have been reported to perform poorly when interpreting sentences containing restrictive and additive focus particles by treating sentences with a focus particle in the same way as sentences without it. Careful comparisons between results of previous studies indicate that this phenomenon is less pronounced for restrictive than for additive particles. We argue that this asymmetry is an effect of the presuppositional status of the proposition triggered by the additive particle. We tested this in two experiments with German-learning three-and four-year-olds using a method that made the exploitation of the information provided by the particles highly relevant for completing the task. Three-year-olds already performed remarkably well with sentences both with auch 'also' and with nur 'only'. Thus, children can consider the presuppositional contribution of the additive particle in their sentence interpretation and can exploit the restrictive particle as a marker of exhaustivity. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 509 KW - presupposition KW - comprehension KW - implicature KW - acquisition KW - semantics KW - asymmetry KW - tolerance KW - mandarin Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-414911 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 509 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Grubic, Mira A1 - Wierzba, Marta T1 - Presupposition Accommodation of the German Additive Particle auch (= “too”) T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Presupposition triggers differ with respect to whether their presupposition is easily accommodatable. The presupposition of focus-sensitive additive particles like also or too is often classified as hard to accommodate, i.e., these triggers are infelicitous if their presupposition is not entailed by the immediate linguistic or non-linguistic context. We tested two competing accounts for the German additive particle auch concerning this requirement: First, that it requires a focus alternative to the whole proposition to be salient, and second, that it merely requires an alternative to the focused constituent (e.g., an individual) to be salient. We conducted two experiments involving felicity judgments as well as questions asking for the truth of the presupposition to be accommodated. Our results suggest that the latter account is too weak: mere previous mention of a potential alternative to the focused constituent is not enough to license the use of auch. However, our results also suggest that the former account is too strong: when an alternative of the focused constituent is prementioned and certain other accommodation-enhancing factors are present, the context does not have to entail the presupposed proposition. We tested the following two potentially accommodation-enhancing factors: First, whether the discourse can be construed to be from the perspective of the individual that the presupposition is about, and second, whether the presupposition is needed to establish coherence between the host sentence of the additive particle and the preceding context. The factor coherence was found to play a significant role. Our results thus corroborate the results of other researchers showing that discourse participants go to great lengths in order to identify a potential presupposition to accommodate, and we contribute to these results by showing that coherence is one of the factors that enhance accommodation. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 547 KW - alternatives KW - additive particles KW - presupposition KW - anaphoricity KW - accommodation KW - experimental data KW - German Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-428003 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 547 ER -