Vortrag: Prof. Remus Gergel:"Changing what’s given? Presuppositions in diachrony”

This talk aims to address the often neglected question of what happens to presuppositions in language change. When it comes to shifts in meaning, one line of thought touched upon over the years has been that implicatures can change into lexicalized meanings. At the same time, both implicatures and presuppositions have been suggested to be subject to a principle of Avoid Pragmatic Overload, e.g. in Eckardt’s seminal work. The perspective here will be a different one. Starting out from Heim’s suggestion that presuppositions should be maximized at synchronic stages, I explore the route that their overt marking may also be advantageous diachronically. Presuppositions thereby would come out as rather particularly resilient, rather than something easily to be eliminated, in diachronic processes. Interesting empirical upshots of the new line of thought such as the rise of clefts in English and other phenomena will be discussed.

Gastvortrag von Prof. Remus Gergel (Universität Saarland)