Implicature and Presupposition within Compositional Semantics (wissenschaftliches Netzwerk)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Uli Sauerland
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2004 to 2008
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5432644

All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Workind from the perspekcive of generative grammar, we investigate three mental mechanisms that are widely assumed to underlie this ability: Compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation. For all three mechanisms, formal models have been advanced recently that are accurate for many cases, and there is some consensus in the field that further progress requires stronger interconnections between these results. We seek to bring togehter experts from these subfields to bring this agenda forward. From this perspective, we expect to gain new insigths into important empirical phenomena; for example, agreement licensing, from choice phenomena, and exhaustivity effects.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks