Marlijn Meijer, who is visiting this semester from the Humboldt University in Berlin, will give us a glimpse into her ongoing dissertation work in Semantics Workshop this Wednesday (October 19, 12:25 PM). Here is a short description of her talk:

This talk focuses on the English propositional anaphor so in embedded polar replies, such as the one in (1B):

A:  Is John coming to the party?
B:  I think so.

In the literature, it has been claimed that so cannot occur with factives (Kipsarky and Kiparsky 1971) or that so indicates that the speaker does not commit to its referent (Needham 2012). However, as noted by Bhatt (2010), so can in fact occur with the factive predicate know, which is problematic for the existing theories on so. In this talk, I will present the results from a small corpus study and sketch an alternative account of so, that suggests that so comes with the presupposition that its referent is still under discussion, i.e. not part of the common ground.