Presuppositions of ‘again’ and the context-dependence

Abstract

This paper presents a semantic investigation of the cross-linguistic behavior of ‘again’ in terms of the presupposition, mainly discussing the case of pseudo-repetitive reading of tasi ‘again’ in Korean, first noted in Lee (2017). The most significant property of pseudo-repetitive reading is that the presupposition of tasi can be met by an overtly nonidentical prior event. Presenting a broader range of novel data and pointing out that previous analyses cannot properly account for the observed phenomenon of pseudo-repetitive reading, this paper proposes an alternative analysis which implements a contextual component in the lexical denotation of tasi. This contextual analysis proposes that the presupposition of tasi is met by a ‘contextually-identical’ prior event, providing new insights into the perspectives of presupposition and its context-dependence.