Focus, evidentiality and soft triggers

  • Authors:
  • Márta Abrusán

  • Affiliations:
  • Lichtenberg Kolleg, Georg---August Universität Göttingen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • AC'11 Proceedings of the 18th Amsterdam colloquim conference on Logic, Language and Meaning
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Soft triggers are fairly easily suspendable in context. Two main environments in which this happens have been identified: (a) The presupposition of soft triggers can be suspended by focus (cf. Beaver 2004) (b) Simons (2007) has observed that many soft triggers such as hear, see, believe, discover, know, etc. have semantically parenthetical uses which are not presuppositional. This paper offers a way of predicting these facts in the context of a theory applicable to soft triggers.