id: 06100877
dt: a
an: 06100877
au: Abrusán, Márta; Szendröi, Kriszta
ti: Experimenting with the king of France.
so: Aloni, Maria (ed.) et al., Logic, language and meaning. 18th Amsterdam
    colloquium, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, December 19‒21, 2011. Revised
    selected papers. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-642-31481-0/pbk). Lecture
    Notes in Computer Science 7218, 102-111 (2012).
py: 2012
pu: Berlin: Springer
la: EN
cc: 
ut: definite descriptions; presupposition; topics; verifiability; experimental
    pragmatics
ci: 
li: doi:10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_11
ab: Summary: Definite descriptions with reference failure have been argued to
    give rise to different truth-value intuitions depending on the local
    linguistic context in which they appear. We conducted an experiment to
    investigate these alleged differences. We have found that pragmatic
    strategies dependent on verification (Lasersohn 1993,von Fintel 2004)
    and topicalization (Strawson 1964, Reinhart 1981), suggested in the
    context of trivalent theories, both play a role in people’s
    subjective judgments. We suggest that a way to reconcile this finding
    is to assume that verification of a sentence ‒ where possible ‒
    proceeds through a pivot constituent, and that this concept is relevant
    for the proper description of how speakers understand semantic meaning.
    At the same time, it seems that trivalent theories cannot easily
    account for the full pattern of the results found. We speculate that
    our findings are best explained by combining these pragmatic strategies
    with an approach that assumes that definite descriptions have a
    bivalent semantics, as well as a pragmatic presupposition attached to
    them.
rv: