Cover not available

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

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Recalling presupposed information

Evidence from the online processing of presuppositions in political tweets

ORCiD logo with link | Roma Tre University
ORCiD logo with link | Zurich University of Applied Sciences
ORCiD logo with link | University of Innsbruck
 | University of Neuchâtel
Published online: 9 November 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22011.mas
Abstract
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.
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
References (53)
References
Bach, Kent. 1999. The myth of conventional implicature. Linguistics and Philosophy 221. 327–366. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barlaz, Marissa. 2022. Ordinal logistic regression in R. [URL] (Last access: 18 November 2022)
Barr, Dale J., Roger Levy, Christoph Scheepers & Harry J. Tily. 2013. Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language 681. 255–278. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Borst, Jelmer P., Niels A. Taatgen & Hedderik van Rij. 2010. The problem state: A cognitive bottleneck in multitasking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, Cognition 36(2). 363–382. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barton, Stephen B. & Anthony J. Sanford. 1993. A case study of anomaly detection: Shallow semantic processing and cohesion establishment. Memory & Cognition 21(4). 477–487. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brauer, Markus & John J. Curtin. 2018. Linear mixed-effects models and the analysis of non-independent data: A unified framework to analyze categorical and continuous independent variables that vary within-subjects and/or within items. Psychological Methods 23(3). 389–411. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brocca, Nicola, Davide Garassino & Viviana Masia. 2016. Politici nella rete o nella rete dei politici? L’implicito nella comunicazione politica italiana su Twitter. PhiN-Beiheft 111. 68–79.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Burkhardt, Petra. 2007. The P600 reflects cost of new information in discourse memory. NeuroReport 18(17). 1851–1854. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Christensen, Rune Haubo B. 2019. Ordinal-regression models for ordinal data. R package version 2019, 12–10. Available online at: [URL] (Last access: 4 December 2021).
Christiansen, Morten H. & Nick Chater. 2016. The now-or-never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 391. e62. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
de Saussure, Louis. 2013. Background relevance. Journal of Pragmatics 591. 178–189. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
de Saussure, Louis & Steve Oswald. 2009. Argumentation et engagement du locuteur: Pour un point de vue subjectiviste. Nouveaux cahiers de linguistique française 291. 215–243.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Domaneschi, Filippo & Di Paola, Simona. 2018. The Processing Costs of Presupposition Accommodation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 47(3):483–503. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Domaneschi, Filippo, Elena Carrea, Carlo Penco & Alberto Greco. 2014. The cognitive load of presupposition triggers: Mandatory and optional repairs in presupposition failure. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 291. 136–146. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Domaneschi, Filippo, Paolo Canal, Viviana Masia, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri & Valentina Bambini. 2018. N400 and P600 modulation in presupposition accommodation: The effect of different trigger types. Journal of Neurolinguistics 451. 13–35. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Drai, Nathanaël & Louis de Saussure. 2016. Quand l’implicite devient explicite: D’un accident expérimental à une étude pilote. Syntaxe et Sémantique 2016/1(17). 115–133. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Endresen, Anna & Laura A. Janda. 2016. Five statistical models for Likert-type experimental data on acceptability judgments. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science 3(2). 217–250. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ferreira, Fernanda & Matthew W. Lowder. 2016. Prediction, information structure, and good-enough language processing. Psychology of Learning and Motivation 651. 217–247. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garassino, Davide, Viviana Masia & Nicola Brocca. 2019. Tweet as you speak. The role of implicit strategies and pragmatic functions in political communication: Data from a diamesic comparison. Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata 2–31. 187–208.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garassino, Davide, Nicola Brocca & Viviana Masia. 2022. Is implicit communication quantifiable? A corpus-based analysis of British and Italian political tweets. Journal of Pragmatics 1941. 9–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan T. 2020. On classification trees and random forests in corpus linguistics: Some words of caution and suggestions for improvement. Corpus Linguistics & Linguistic Theory 16(3). 617–647. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hothorn, Torsten, Kurt Hornik & Achim Zeileis. 2006. Unbiased recursive partitioning: A conditional inference framework. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 15(3). 651–674. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Loftus, Elizabeth F. 1975. Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology 7(4). 560–572. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo. 2016. The “exaptation” of linguistic implicit strategies. Springer Plus 51. 1106. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2019. La lingua disonesta. Roma: Carocci.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo & Viviana Masia. 2014. Implicitness impact: Measuring texts. Journal of Pragmatics 611. 161–184. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo & Viviana Masia. 2015. Facilitating automation in sentence processing: The emergence of topic and presupposition in human communication. Topoi 37(2). 343–354. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lowder, Matthew W. & Peter C. Gordon. 2015. Focus takes time: Structural effects on reading. Psychonomic Bulletin Review 221. 1733–1738. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lucisano, Pietro & Maria E. Piemontese. 1988. GULPEASE: Una formula per la predizione della difficoltà dei testi in lingua italiana. Scuola e città XXXIX (3). 110–124.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lüdecke, Daniel. 2018. ggeffects: Tidy data frames of marginal effects from regression models. Journal of Open Source Software 3(26). 772. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kirsten, Mareike, Sonja Tiemann, Verena C. Seibold, Ingo Hertrich, Sigrid Beck & Bettina Rolke. 2014. When the polar bear encounters many polar bears: Event-related potential context effects evoked by uniqueness failure. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 29(9). 1147–1162. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Masia, Viviana, Paolo Canal, Irene Ricci, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri & Valentina Bambini. 2017. Presupposition of new information as a pragmatic garden path: Evidence from Event-related brain potentials. Journal of Neurolinguistics 421. 31–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morency, Patrick, Steve Oswald & Louis de Saussure. 2008. Explicitness, implicitness and commitment attribution: A cognitive pragmatic approach. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 221. 197–219. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Müller, Misha L. 2018. Accommodation: A cognitive heuristic for background information. Anglophonia 251. Available online at: [URL]. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Piciucco, Emanuela, Viviana Masia, Emanuele Maiorana, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri & Patrizio Campisi. 2022. Information structure effects on the processing of nouns and verbs: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Language and Cognition 14(1). 85–108. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven, Martin A. Nowak & James J. Lee. 2008. The logic of indirect speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(3). 833–838. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2022. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Available online at: [URL] (Last access: 24 May 2023).
Sbisà, Marina. 2007. Pathways to explicitness. Lingue e Linguaggio 61. 101–120.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schwarz, Florian. 2015. Presuppositions vs. asserted content in online processing. In Florian Schwarz (ed.), Experimental perspectives on presupposition: Studies in theoretical psycholinguistics, 89–108. Dordrecht: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan, Fabrice Clément, Cristophe Heintz, Olivier Mascaro, Hugo Mercier, Gloria Origgi & Deirdre Wilson. 2010. Epistemic vigilance. Mind and Language 25(4). 359–393. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stalnaker, Robert. 1973. Presuppositions. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2(4). 447–457. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002. Common ground. Linguistics and Philosophy 251. 701–721. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tiemann, Sonja. 2014. The processing of wieder (“again”) and other presupposition triggers. Tübingen: Universität Tübingen PhD dissertation.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tiemann, Sonja, Mareike Schmid, Nadine Bade, Bettina Rolke, Ingo Hertrich, Herman Ackermann, Julia Knapp & Sigrid Beck. 2011. Psycholinguistic evidence for presuppositions: On-line and off-line data. In Ingo Reich, Eva Horch & Dennis Pauly (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn & Bedeutung 151, 581–595. Saarbrucken: Saarland University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
von Fintel, Kai. 2008. What is presupposition accommodation, again? Philosophical Perspectives 22(1). 137–170. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wickham, Hadley et al. 2019. Welcome to the tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43). 1686. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre. 1975. Presuppositions and non-truth-conditional semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation PhD dissertation.
Wilson, Deirdre & Dan Sperber. 1979. Ordered entailments: An alternative to presuppositional theories. Syntax and Semantics 111. 299–323. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1981/1979. On Grice’s theory of conversation. In Paul Werth (ed.), Conversation and discourse, 155–178. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Masia, Viviana
2025. The evidential meaning of presupposition and implicature between retractability and deniability of information. Folia Linguistica 59:1 ► pp. 153 ff. DOI logo
Brocca, Nicola, Viviana Masia & Davide Garassino
2024. Empowering critical digital literacy in EFL: Teachers’ evaluation of didactic materials involving the recognition of presupposed information. Language Teaching Research DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue