The talk discussed several experiments that tested the role of presuppositionality of the verb and of contextual givenness on the preference for to,chto-clauses. The results confirm the importance of both factors, but also show that presuppositionality/givenness is neither necessary nor sufficient for to,chto-clauses, contrary to some claims in the literature. The results highlight the importance of gradient constraints on syntactic constructions. The talk also looked at recent experimental studies of extractions from chto-clauses that test whether presuppositionality may be associated with a silent variant of “to”.

We invite you to listen to the plenary talk by Mikhail Knyazev here.

Learn more about the conference