Implicativity in Interaction: Effects of conversational context and lexical meaning

Abstract:

Inferences derived from utterances including presupposition triggers reflect public commitments whose negotiation in dialogue can be taken as an alternative basis for grounding interaction coordination instead of communicating Gricean intentions. As such, the particular presupposition triggers available in a language can be taken as conventional resources (affordances) for establishing common commitments in interaction. To investigate such variable inferences, we implemented a judgement task to test the inferential profile of the verbs remember, manage, forget and fail in English and Tamil. Our findings reveal that speaker commitment to the truth of the complement was stronger in English in both monological and conversational contexts in comparison to Tamil. Thus, the results provide preliminary evidence that an appropriate account of the processing conditions of such verbs requires not only a fine-grained account of their conceptual structure and the particular syntactic constructions in which they appear but also taking into account the influence of constraints arising from the structure of a fine-grained conversational model.

Research areas:

• Reasoning

Year:

2025

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

Agency and Intentions in Language 5