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Presuppositions: an Experimental Investigation

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Presuppositions : an experimental investigation Robert Reinecke To cite this version: Robert Reinecke. Presuppositions : an experimental investigation. Philosophy. Université de Lyon, 2020. English. NNT : 2020LYSEN067. tel-03170719 HAL Id: tel-03170719 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-03170719 Submitted on 16 Mar 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Numéro National de Thèse : 2020LYSEN067 THÈSE de DOCTORAT DE L’UNIVERSITÉ DE LYON opérée par l’École Normale Supérieure de Lyon École Doctorale n°487 École Doctorale de Philosophie Discipline : Philosophie, épistémologie Soutenue publiquement le 11/12/2020, par : Robert Reinecke Presuppositions: An experimental investigation Présuppositions : une investigation expérimentale Devant le jury composé de : Domaneschi, Filippo Professeur, University of Genoa Rapporteur Fossard, Marion Professeure, University of Neuchâtel Rapporteure Nazir, Tatjana Directrice de recherche CNRS, HDR, Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (Lyon) Examinatrice Noveck, Ira Directeur de recherche CNRS, HDR, Examinateur/ Université de Paris Président Carvallo, Sarah Professeure, Université de Franche-Comté Directrice de thèse Jayez, Jacques PU, Professeur émérite, ENS de Lyon Co-directeur de thèse ii Acknowledgements My first visit to the L2C2, le Laboratoire sur le Langage, cerveau et cognition, was in 2013 when I first met my partly chosen and partly assigned supervisor for the Master 1 thesis, Jacques Jayez. At that time, linguistics was completely new to me and as Jacques mentioned the term dynamic semantics, I was completely overwhelmed and primed by the term dynamic since I had just finished my bachelor thesis using the Dynamic Systems Theory Approach. The more I learned about his proposed research, the more I realized that it had nothing to do with what I had in mind when first meeting him; however, his great interest to presuppositions and how they are processed has been infectious to me. Seven years after this first encounter have now passed and I have finally reached the finish line. I am very grateful to all your support and your supervision throughout the years, Jacques. A very big thank you also goes to Sarah Carvallo who agreed to be one of the directors of my thesis. Thank you, Sarah, for always being there when I needed you the most. Defending a dissertation in the times of a pandemic is different, but thanks to all members of the defense committee this experience was a very pleasant one. First, I would like to thank the two reviewers Marion Fossard and Filippo Domaneschi. Their positive feedback and insightful comments were very much appreciated. Thank you for your immense effort. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the president Ira Noveck. Thanks to you, the virtually held defense became very real when you asked all participants to stand up before announcing the approval of my dissertation. Thank you for your kind words and this very special moment. Lastly, a very warm thank you also goes to the last member of the defense committee Tatjana Nazir. The L2C2, which became the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod in the middle of my PhD, has been a wonderful place to conduct the research for my PhD. Thank you Tatjana Nazir for your assistance, your guidance, and helping me out during the second year of my PhD, thank you Anne Cheylus for your extraordinary help setting up some of my experiments, thank you Christiane Battoue for being the administrative soul of our institute, thank you Ira Noveck for your helpful advice over the years, thank you Olivier Mascaro, thank you Yves Paulignan, thank you Anne Reboul, and from the deepest of my heart I would like to thank Diana Mazzarella, whose comments and also our discussions largely contributed to the finalization of my PhD: Thank you. iii Lyon has been my home for about five years, the longest time I have been somewhere after finishing high school and it has really felt like home. Thank you, Olivier Mascaro, for your eternal loyalty to climbing and not to forget the well-deserved and never-ending dinners afterwards and for joining me to be in the same room Eddy Merckx, the nowadays much less dangerous ‘Cannibal’. Thank you Chloé Achino for broadening my horizon, for being a great friend and showing me the different movie theatres in town and for always letting me stay at your place even if my requests were always last minute. I’m grateful to my friends Hannes Hartmann who has always supported me over the years and without whom I would have never overcome some technological issues, Sascha Leisterer who has been a dear friend since our first bachelor together in Berlin, Elisabeth Wirion whose language skills and kindness have always provided valuable support, Justine Viala for making the world a better place with her smile and optimism, and Jan Meyer who always makes me feel like home independently of the geopgraphic location. Dal più profondo del mio cuore, ringrazio anche Michele e Patrizia che mi hanno sostenuto con ottimo cibo italiano e la loro gentilezza durante la fase finale di questa tesi. Spero che un giorno possiamo anche essere a Bosa senza pensare di finire la mia tesi: Un grazie infinito. Ein grosses Dankeschön geht auch an meine Schwester Marie und an meine Eltern Uwe und Karola. Jeder von euch hat auf seine eigene Weise dazu beigetragen, dass es an Unterstützung in den Jahren der Doktorarbeit nicht mangelte. Lyon will always remain a special place to me since it has also been the place where our journey began. One of your first questions was: What native language do you speak? Five years, three cities, one dissertation, and endless practice talks, draft readings, and moments of procrastination later, you are still hanging in there. A simple thank you would just be an understatement. iv Abstract Speakers communicate more than what they explicitly state. For this reason, addressees rely on linguistic and extra-linguistic cues to recover different levels of explicit and implicit meaning. Presupposition triggers are one of these cues. These are linguistic expressions or constructions (e.g. change of state verbs, factive verbs, it-clefts, etc.) which trigger the recovery of propositions that the speaker presupposes, or takes for granted, for the purpose of the conversation. This thesis investigates the phenomenon of presupposition within the framework of experimental pragmatics, and it comprises three studies based on the following experimental methods: judgement-tasks, EEG method and grip-force sensor method. This thesis combines a social perspective, which focuses on reputation-management via alternative discourse strategies (Study 1), with a cognitive perspective, which examines the cognitive costs and sensori-motor correlates associated with presupposition processing (Studies 2 and 3). Study 1 examines the impact of different discourse strategies (saying, implicating and presupposing) on the attribution of speaker commitment towards the message communicated. By operationalizing commitment as a function of the reputational cost (drop of trust) related to the transmission of false information, Study 1 shows that presupposing is perceived as equally committal than saying and more committal than implicating. Study 2 investigates the cognitive costs associated with targeting presuppositions in discourse continuations. By focusing on additive contexts introduced by the French discourse particle aussi, Study 2 shows that felicitous discourse continuations targeting a presupposition elicit the same ERP response than felicitous discourse continuations targeting an asserted context. This finding suggests that when presupposition processing is part of an appropriate, pragmatically felicitous, discourse strategy, it does not come with any additional cognitive costs. Study 3 examines the sensori-motor correlates of processing action-related language in presuppositional constructions (complement clause of factive verbs) and non-presuppositional ones (complement clause of non-factive verbs). The results show that the former elicit a greater sensori-motor activation than the latter, thus revealing that presupposed information, whose truth is taken for granted, is processed differently from information whose truth has not been established in discourse. v Overall, this thesis contributes to the study of presupposition by providing empirical evidence in support of the theoretical distinction between different layers of meaning. On the one hand, it shows that their employment leads to different commitments in discourse and has implications on the interpersonal negotiation of trust. On the other hand, it shows that while presupposition processing is not inherently more costly from a cognitive perspective, its cognitive correlates (such as the engagement of the sensori-motor system) can differ from those mapping information with a different discourse status. Keywords: commitment, language processing, discourse strategy, felicity, language-induced motor activity, experimental pragmatics vi Résumé Les locuteurs
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