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Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 30:1 (2023) ► pp.92–119

Recalling presupposed information

Evidence from the online processing of presuppositions in political tweets

ORCID logo | Roma Tre University
ORCID logo | Zurich University of Applied Sciences
ORCID logo | University of Innsbruck
| University of Neuchâtel

This article addresses, experimentally, the question of how presuppositions are cognitively processed and retrieved in discourse. In the proposed research, we have administered tweets produced by Italian politicians to native speakers so as to assess how easily they could retrieve the presupposed content of two presupposition triggers (definite descriptions and change of state verbs), as opposed to their explicit paraphrase, by answering verification questions. Results showed that content presupposed by change of state verbs was likely to receive more attention than content conveyed by definite descriptions; this could possibly be due to the greater effort involved in mentally representing the event taken for granted by the predicates. Definite descriptions, on the contrary, seem to instruct to a shallower processing modality, which means that their content is processed less attentively or in a ‘good-enough’ way.

Keywords: presupposition, shallow processing, information recall and retrieval, Twitter
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research background
    • 2.1Presuppositions and experimental pragmatics
    • 2.2Presupposition processing within behavioral and neurophysiological purviews
    • 2.3Implicit communication on Twitter
  • 3.The research design
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2The experiment
      • 3.2.1The stimuli
      • 3.2.2The experimental procedure
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1The sample
    • 4.2Statistical analysis
      • 4.2.1Conditional inference trees
      • 4.2.2Ordinal mixed-effect regression
    • 4.3Discussion
      • 4.3.1Differences between trigger types and shallow processing
      • 4.3.2The role of the topic / comment partition
      • 4.3.3Issues with the experimental design
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Authors’ contributions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22011.mas
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