Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Using “A” in noun phrases such as “A father of the vic-tim” is odd, which is commonly explained by the princi-ple Maximize Presupposition, requiring speakers to usethe alternative with the strongest presupposition (here“The”, given its uniqueness presupposition). This re-sults in an anti-uniqueness inference for “A” (clashingwith stereotypical expectations here), sometimes labelledas an ‘anti-presupposition’ (Percus, 2006), as it derivesfrom reasoning over the presuppositions of alternativeforms. We compare these inferences to the uniquenessinferences associated with definites, while manipulatinguniqueness expectations in a picture manipulation taskusing visual world eye-tracking. This offers a minimalcomparison of uniqueness-based inferences that are lexi-cally encoded vs. pragmatically inferred, and furthermoretests the prediction that the accommodatability of the def-inite’s presupposition plays a role in the derivation of anti-uniqueness inferences (Rouillard & Schwarz, 2017).