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home / papers / 2018 / To accommodate or to ignore?: The presuppositions of <i>again</i> and <i>continue</i> across contexts

To accommodate or to ignore?: The presuppositions of <i>again</i> and <i>continue</i> across contexts

Paper · 2018 · Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin, Jeremy Zehr and Florian Schwarz

Summary

The paper asks what listeners do when a presupposition trigger appears in a context that does not support its presupposition. One option is to accommodate it. The other is to drop the presupposed content and keep only the assertion. Earlier work (Glanzberg 2005; Domaneschi et al. 2014; Tiemann 2014) claims that "weak" triggers such as again can simply be ignored, while "strong" triggers such as continue force accommodation.

The authors test this claim with a picture matching experiment comparing again and continue. They record three things: which picture participants select, their response times, and how confident they feel afterwards. In the conditions, either the presupposition or the assertion is left unsettled, or the presupposition is contradicted.

For both triggers, participants took the presupposed content into account. They accommodated it even when the task did not depend on it. Presupposed and asserted content also behaved differently from each other. Again was accommodated more reluctantly and with lower confidence than continue.

The results contradict the "ignore" accounts but still support real differences between triggers. Two alternative accounts can explain those differences: entailment of the presupposition for continue, and the anaphoric nature of again.

Key points

  • The two triggers sit on opposite sides of the main classifications: again is weak (Glanzberg) and hard (Abusch 2010), while continue is strong and soft. Test items contrasted a sentence using again to describe John's Wednesday trip to the aquarium with one stating that "John continued going to the aquarium".
  • The experiment was a picture matching task with three measures: response choice, response times and follow-up confidence ratings. The conditions included Presupposition Open, Presupposition Inconsistent, Assertion Open and True Control.
  • Target pictures that clashed with the presupposition were accepted somewhat less often for again than for continue.
  • In the Presupposition Open versus Presupposition Inconsistent comparison, trigger type interacted with confidence: the confidence increase was larger for continue. A parallel interaction in the Presupposition Open versus Assertion Open comparison was only marginally significant.
  • The authors explain earlier findings through limited memory accuracy and how participants answered count questions, rather than through ignoring. These findings were weaker recall for re- (Domaneschi et al.) and event-count answers that skip the earlier event implied by again (Tiemann).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Build the test so that presupposed and asserted content can each be left open or contradicted independently; this isolates the contribution of each layer instead of measuring overall acceptance.
  • I2. Treat accommodation as the default repair: an unsupported presupposition is added to the context rather than dropped, even when it is not strictly needed.
  • I3. Accommodation can carry a trigger-specific confidence, lower for anaphoric again than for continue, whose assertion depends on the presupposition.
  • I4. Collecting a confidence rating after the choice exposes reluctance that accuracy alone would hide.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Evaluation suites could include paired items where only the presupposition or only the assertion is unsupported, acting as negative controls for whether the pipeline separates the two layers.
  • I2 (world): When again or continue appears with no earlier event in the text, the world model could insert an earlier event marked as accommodated rather than silently omitting it.
  • I3 (frames): Presupposition triggers in prag could carry a class label (separable vs. dependent assertion) and a graded confidence on the accommodated content, so later steps can explain how firmly it is held.
  • I4 (answer): For questions like "how many times did X happen", the reader could state whether its count includes accommodated events and how confident it is, reflecting the gap Tiemann observed.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia · United States170 works · 60,739 citations

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 9,086 worksArtificial Intelligence · 8,889 worksArts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPhilosophy · 211 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Implicature · 72 works

Cite

Cite as Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin, Jeremy Zehr and Florian Schwarz. 2018. To accommodate or to ignore?: The presuppositions of <i>again</i> and <i>continue</i> across contexts. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.402

@article{bacovcin2018accommodate,
  title = {{To accommodate or to ignore?: The presuppositions of <i>again</i> and <i>continue</i> across contexts}},
  author = {Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin, Jeremy Zehr and Florian Schwarz},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.402},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.402}
}

References

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  26. How to cite this article: Bacovcin, Hezekiah Akiva, Jeremy Zehr and Florian Schwarz. 2018. To accommodate or to ignore?: The presuppositions of again and continue across contexts. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1): 16. 1–23, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.402 ↗
  27. Accepted: 03 November 2017 find
  28. Published: 30 January 2018 find
  29. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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