We are happy to announce a talk by Yuqiu Chen (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: May 7, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Do we discover that nonnative speakers are more tolerant of at-issueness violations?
Abstract:
Presuppositions are traditionally considered projective inferences triggered by specific expressions and taken for granted in discourse. However, research has shown that they are not homogeneous with respect to their projection behavior, giving rise to different classification schemes, among them the distinction between semantically projective hard triggers and pragmatically projective soft triggers (Abusch 2002, 2010). More recent work highlights the role of at-issueness and its relation to projection (Simons et al. 2010, Tonhauser et al. 2018), with Aravind & Hackl (2017) proposing that presuppositions cannot directly target the QUD. At the same time, findings on scalar implicatures suggest that L2 speakers may be more tolerant than L1 speakers to pragmatic infelicities (Chen 2019), raising questions about how L2 tolerance relates to the heterogeneity of presuppositions. This talk addresses whether hard and soft triggers differ in their ability to convey at-issue content and whether L2 speakers are more tolerant than L1 speakers with regard to this distinction.
To address these questions, two experiments were conducted. Experiment I (Chen 2022) uses a felicity judgment task, comparing German native speakers with Chinese learners of German (DaF), focusing on cases in which presuppositions are forced to be at-issue. Experiment II (Chen & Antomo 2024) employs a certainty rating task and compares native speakers of German and Chinese, focusing on four classical presupposition triggers and their projection strength. Results show that the hard-soft distinction is reflected in an asymmetry regarding the ability to express at-issue content, and that L2 speakers are more tolerant than L1 speakers of at-issueness violations, with this effect being unexpectedly stronger for hard triggers. Cross-linguistically, projection behavior is stable given suitable semantic equivalence, while soft triggers show greater heterogeneity than assumed.
In sum, the findings show that nonnative speakers exhibit increased tolerance toward at-issueness violations, but not across all trigger types. In addition, while the heterogeneity of presuppositional projection appears broadly stable across languages, variation between triggers requires more fine-grained investigation.