Cataphoric presupposition verification and symmetric f iltering: The case of Occasion verbs

Abstract

Presenting evidence from four offline rating experiments, we argue that a verb class we characterize as Occasion verbs (e.g., thank, criticize, congratulate; partly overlapping with judgment verbs [13]) displays the intriguing property of allowing for cataphoric presupposition verification more broadly than other triggers discussed in previous research. Experiment 1 through 3 used methods established by Tonhauser and colleagues ([33, 34]) to show that Occasion verbs do indeed pattern with a selection of thirteen other well-known triggers (e.g., factive and aspectual verbs, demonstrative noun phrases). In addition, Experiments 1 and 2 also provided evidence that Occasion verbs– as opposed to those well-established triggers– allow for the cataphoric verification of presuppositions in a separate clause. Experiment 4 provided more targeted evidence as to the compositional consequences of this cataphoric verifiability. We compared the filtering behaviour of Occasion verbs with factive or aspectual triggers (e.g., know and continue) for conjunctions in the antecedent of conditionals. The results show that while factive and aspectual verbs show left-to-right filtering asymmetry (cf. [22]), Occasion verbs display symmetric filtering.