PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Presenting evidence from four offline rating experiments, we argue that a verb class we characterize as *Occasion verbs* (e.g.,*thank,criticize,congratulate*; partly overlapping with *judgment verbs* [13]) displays the intriguing property of allowing for cataphoric presupposition verification more broadly than other triggers discussed in previous research. Experiment 1 through 3 used methods established by Tonhauser and colleagues ([33,34]) to show that Occasion verbs do indeed pattern with a selection of thirteen other well-known triggers (e.g., factive and aspectual verbs, demonstrative noun phrases). In addition, Experiments 1 and 2 also provided evidence that Occasion verbs – as opposed to those well-established triggers – allow for the cataphoric verification of presuppositions in a separate clause. Experiment 4 provided more targeted evidence as to the compositional consequences of this cataphoric verifiability. We compared the filtering behaviour of Occasion verbs with factive or aspectual triggers (e.g., *know* and *continue*) for conjunctions in the antecedent of conditionals. The results show that while factive and aspectual verbs show left-to-right filtering asymmetry (cf. [22]), Occasion verbs display symmetric filtering.