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The influence of world knowledge on projectivity

The change of state verb `stop' is known to trigger a pre-state presupposition of the form `X used to V'.However, confronted with a question such as `Did David stop dancing ballet?', listeners do not necessarily understand that David used to dance ballet. Several factors seem to converge in influencing listeners' understanding of presuppositions in these so-called embedding environments, of which questions are an example. One of these factors was found to be at-issueness, the extent to which content is judged to be under debate. Another factor that was claimed to influence the processing of presuppositions was world knowledge in form of prior probabilities of events. Following this argumentation, listeners who find that it is unlikely that David dances ballet when processing `Did David stop dancing ballet?', are claimed to less likely understand that David used to dance ballet and stopped doing so.This thesis investigated the influence of listeners' prior beliefs on their processing of presuppositions, and more specifically, in what way the understanding of presuppositions triggered by `stop' is influenced by gender stereotypes (i.e. the belief that a ballet dancer is more likely a woman than a man). Whereas the influence of at-issueness could be replicated, no evidence was found that listener's gender stereotypes affect their understanding of presuppositions. Instead, the results are in line with the hypothesis that listeners revise their prior beliefs when they are confronted with utterances that contradict their beliefs.