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EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS OF INDIRECTLY CONVEYED MEANING: ASSERTION VERSUS PRESUPPOSITION IN FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Author(s) -
Carrell Patricia L.
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1977.tb00127.x
Subject(s) - presupposition , linguistics , noun phrase , psychology , assertion , sentence , phrase , meaning (existential) , semantics (computer science) , noun , determiner phrase , computer science , philosophy , psychotherapist , programming language
The theoretical linguistic distinction between assertion and presupposition was empirically tested with two groups of subjects—young children acquiring English as their first language and adults acquiring English as a second language. The distinction was tested via measurement of the frequency of perceptual errors as a function of differences between asserted information and presupposed information in cleft and pseudo‐cleft sentence patterns. Subjects heard a cleft or pseudo‐cleft sentence prior to presentation of a slide picture in which the asserted or presupposed noun phrase was misrepresented. The task was to decide if the sentence correctly described the picture. Results indicated that, for both groups of subjects, significantly more errors occurred when the misrepresentation involved the presupposed noun phrase than when it involved the asserted noun phrase.