Selecting Presuppositions in Conditional Clauses. Results from a Psycholinguistic Experiment.

In this paper, we propose an experiment concerning presupposition selection in conditional sentences containing a presupposition trigger in the consequent. Many theories claim that sentences like if p, q q'-where q is the presupposition of the assertive component q'-have unconditional presuppositions, namely, they simply project q. Other theories suggest that these kinds of conditional sentences project conditional presuppositions of the form if p, q.

Grounding compositional symbols: no composition without discrimination.

The classical computational conception of meaning has been challenged by the idea that symbols must be grounded on sensorimotor processes. A difficult question arises from the fact that grounding representations cannot be symbolic themselves but, in order to support compositionality, should work as primitives. This implies that they should be precisely identifiable and strictly connected with discriminable perceptual features.