Abstract
This paper examines bi-sentential sequences where additive presupposition triggers (e.g. too, again) seem to be obligatory in the second sentence. We present linguistic and experimental evidence against treating these obligatory additivity effects as uniformly following from Maximize Presupposition! (Heim 1991). We propose that the environments giving rise to these effects involve a discourse move that corrects for over-restrictive assumptions about the domain in the immediately preceding move. Crucially, the second move must be compatible with the first. General considerations about how the discourse unfolds, in conjunction with a principle that sentences are interpreted exhaustively by default, make it so that two sentences in such sequences are mutually inconsistent in the absence of the additive.
Highlights
Heim’s (1991) pragmatic principle Maximize Presupposition (MP) mandates that a speaker choose the presuppositionally strongest statement among a set of contextuallyequivalent alternatives
In examples (10) and (11), which are structurally parallel to (8-9), we find no evidence for competition at the local level: the sentences with and without the additive are judged felicitous
We argued that obligatory additive effects are not within the purview of Maximize Presupposition!
Summary
Heim’s (1991) pragmatic principle Maximize Presupposition (MP) mandates that a speaker choose the presuppositionally strongest statement among a set of contextuallyequivalent alternatives. The perceived oddity of the presuppositionally weaker sentences derives from the fact that the anti-presuppositions triggered by their use (e.g. that the speaker believes there is more than one sun) run counter to our expectations (about the speaker’s knowledge1) about the world. The sentence in (6b) triggers the inference that the presupposition of the definite article, namely that there is exactly one guest, is not met in the context of utterance. Together, these observations suggest that additives form a different class from triggers like the and both. To fully motivate a non-uniform treatment of these two classes of phenomena, it needs to be shown that MP is not involved in the generation of obligatory additivity effects at all If speakers derive obligatory additivity effects based on a corresponding rationale, we might expect parallel processing behaviors in tasks that probe for speakers’ evaluation of expressions in competition for conveying the same message
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