Abstract
This paper argues that extant approaches to presupposition projection that eitherrely on strict linear order (Schlenker, 2009) or hierarchy (Romoli and Mandelkern, 2017) cannotprovide a uniform account of data drawn from head-final languages. While building onSchlenker’s theory, this paper resolves the issues by restricting the calculation of local contextsto specific points in the parsing process. The consequence is that the theory makes a predictionrobust to the head directionality parameter.Keywords: presupposition projection, local context, parsing, linear order, hierarchy.
Highlights
Schlenker (2009, 2010, 2011a, 2011b) proposes a parsing-based account of presupposition projection that derives the local context of an expression on the basis of classical truth-conditional semantics
Schlenker argues that there is a pragmatic requirement that a presupposition must be entailed by a local context calculated according to the following definition: (1) Local context (Schlenker 2011, incremental version) The local context of an expression d of propositional or predicative type which occurs in a syntactic environment a b in a context C is the strongest proposition or property x which guarantees that for any expression d’ of the same type as d, for all strings b’ for which a d’ b’ is a well-formed sentence, C c →x a (c’ and d’) b’ ↔ a d’ b’
In (1), the interpreter is completely agnostic to what follows the expression the local context of which is to be calculated (b in this case). It needs to take into account every possible continuation of the sequence a d that results in a well-formed sentence. Schlenker claims that his theory of local contexts achieves explanatory adequacy in the sense that it predicts how presuppositions project based on syntax and classical truth-conditional semantics
Summary
Schlenker (2009, 2010, 2011a, 2011b) proposes a parsing-based account of presupposition projection that derives the local context of an expression on the basis of classical truth-conditional semantics. In (1), the interpreter is completely agnostic to what follows the expression the local context of which is to be calculated (b in this case) It needs to take into account every possible continuation of the sequence a d that results in a well-formed sentence. Schlenker claims that his theory of local contexts achieves explanatory adequacy in the sense that it predicts how presuppositions project based on syntax and classical truth-conditional semantics. While maintaining Schlenker’s view that presupposition projection behavior is closely related to the left-to-right bias inherent in parsing, this paper points out that local contexts cannot be calculated in a strictly incremental fashion. The proposed analysis resolves the problems encountered in Schlenker’s original algorithm and the hierarchy-based account, while reproducing the correct predictions
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