The idiosyncratic behaviour of presupposition triggers with regards to projection has given rise to various experimental investigations. For instance, while the semi-factive predicate realize presupposes the truth of its complement clause in a sentence like ‘she didn’t realize that I have not told the truth’, it merely points to a possibility in ‘if I realize later that I have not told the truth, I will confess it to everyone’ (Karttunen 1971b, p.5). As a result, several experiments focus, to a degree, on a more heterogeneous selection of triggers to demonstrate this variability in presupposition projection (e.g., Xue and Onea (2011), Smith and Hall (2011), Tonhauser et al. (2018)), whereas others are more centred around the clause-embedding predicates to, among other things, attempt to distinguish the so-called factive predicates from the non-factive predicates using their projection behaviour (e.g., de Marneffe et al. (2019), Degen and Tonhauser (2021)).
In this study, I focus on a number of lexical and structural triggers that have been left out of such experimental inquiries. The result of the experiment supports the hypothesis that variability in degrees of projectivity is not limited to only a number of triggers. All triggers, even the ones that are placed in the same group, hold this characteristic. Given the little context that participants are presented with, we argue that the observed variability indicates the important role of context in the projection behaviour of triggers. Thus, following such experiments with a corpus study to investigate naturally occurring data and discover the actual factors that affect the projection behaviour of triggers and cause this variability will be extremely beneficial.