Theory Of Presupposition Research Articles

Theoretical Pragmatics: An Introduction

The last decade witnessed a surge of new research in pragmatics, fuelled by the emergence of new theoretical frameworks, an increased interest in the semantics-pragmatics interface, and the establishment of experimental pragmatics as a new research paradigm. Many of these developments concern the line of pragmatics which originated with the work of H. Paul Grice. Of new theoretical frameworks, we may mention different variants of optimality and game theoretic approaches, localist semantic theories of embedded implicatures, logical globalist formalisations of Gricean pragmatics, and multi-layered semantics for conventional implicatures. At the same time, research in older frameworks such as Neo-Gricean and Post-Gricean pragmatics continued, and new investigations of speech act and presupposition theory emerged. This development led to a diversification of theoretical approaches, a synthesis of which is desirable but not to be expected in the near future. This issue is intended as a contribution to the enhancement of mutual awareness and the discussion of each other’s results.

Towards a theory of presuppositions: Kuyperian contributions

One of the most important themes of contemporary philosophy of science was the discovery of presuppositional beliefs and frameworks as factors influencing scientific research. This article explores the development of a theory of presuppositions within Kuyperian philosophy. The authors discussed in this study represent a few Kuyperian families: Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven (briefly), Wolterstorff, Klapwijk, Duvenage and Botha. The perspective is both historical and systematic. Historically, it refers to the main authors who contributed to establishing the basic features of such a theory. Systematically, the article tries to evaluate the proposals of each contributor by assessing their value and limits. In doing so, the author often defends his own preferences and indicates the directions to be followed.

Optimal Interpretation as an Alternative to Gricean Pragmatics

The paper introduces an optimality theoretic notion of optimal
 interpretation based on presupposition theory and shows that it is a viable
 alternative for Gricean pragmatics. It moreover is directly applicable to
 presupposition and rhetorical structure and improves the insights in those
 areas. The last sections are concerned with provisionally making this point.

‘I know that women don’t like me!’ Presuppositions in therapeutic discourse

One of the biggest problems concerning presuppositions has been correctly dealing with their sensitivity to the context, i.e. why inferences triggered by certain expressions do not project out in all linguistic environments, even though the triggering words preserve their semantic content in different settings. The answer which is of particular interest here goes along with the principles of the binding theory of presuppositions developed by van der Sandt (1992). According to this theory, presuppositions behave as anaphors and can be resolved in the same way at the level of discourse representation. This article contributes to a very scarce body of empirical work on presuppositions, as it scrutinizes examples of presuppositions that act like discourse anaphors in the context of three psychotherapeutic sessions. Such sessions can be analyzed in the same way as ordinary spoken discourse; however, the initial premise that the usage of presuppositions differs in this genre in comparison to daily interaction is confirmed. The results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis indicate that presuppositions are used for different strategic reasons in the two genres compared, which influences the way they should be interpreted and also their frequency.

Presuppositions and common ground

This paper presents problems for Stalnaker’s common ground theory of presupposition. Stalnaker (Linguist and Philos 25:701–721, 2002) proposes a 2-stage process of utterance interpretation: presupposed content is added to the common ground prior to acceptance/rejection of the utterance as a whole. But this revision makes presupposition difficult to distinguish from assertion. A more fundamental problem is that the common ground theory rests on a faulty theory of assertion—that the essence of assertion is to present the content of an utterance as new information. Many examples are presented of utterances which are felicitous but not informative in this way.

Restrições à hipótese do conhecimento mútuo no processo comunicativo

The purpose of this article is to highlight one of these controversial issues, specifically the one that refers to the rejection by S-W of the hypotheses of mutual knowledge (MK), which is replaced by the notion of mutually manifest cognitive environments. This notion is a fundamental presupposition of theory and hence of the principle of relevance (PR), and will be discussed on the basis of arguments that make it possible to clarify the true purpose of the authors.

As brief as possible (but no briefer)

For years researchers struggle to explain an impossible muddle of data, and then BAM! some genius comes and publishes an article in Theoretical Linguistics that turns everything on its head. In this case, the bugbear is the projection problem for presuppositions. The mind-blowing solution succeeds in explaining presuppositional inferences and felicity judgments without the abstruse non-classical logics or transformations of logical forms that others tried previously, but instead with standard classical logic. Most importantly, for this is what makes the innovative everything-on-its-head proposal special, it solves the problem not in terms of projection, but in terms of local satisfaction. The paper to which I refer is, of course, Lauri Karttunen’s (1974) Presupposition and Linguistic Context, published in the very first volume of this journal. Philippe Schlenker’s (henceforth: PS) Be Articulate: A Pragmatic Theory of Presupposition is an important but flawed postscript to Karttunen’s paper. The current work is a postscript to PS’s postscript. After a little warmup exercise to help get into a suitably critical frame of mind, I will put PS’s contribution in context, and then point to some failings and peculiarities.

Words Without Meaning (review)

Reviewed by: Words without meaning by Christopher Gauker Xuelin He Words without meaning. By Christopher Gauker. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 299. ISBN 0262571625. $28. Basing his own approach to linguistic communication on the rejection of two significant notions of speaker meaning and word meaning, Gauker casts new light on some of the most controversial issues in the philosophy of language, ranging from logic puzzles to belief report. This short but impressive monograph consists of twelve chapters, each one providing its own focus on the discussion, but each reinforcing the others to form a well-argued presentation of G’s theory of mind. Ch. 1, ‘The received view’, gives a critical review of the propositional approach to meaning in linguistic communication, one that claims the speaker reveals her belief through the right choice of words and sentences whose meanings are also shared by the hearer. Ch. 2, ‘Mental representation’, criticizes the views that beliefs are mental structures bearing propositional content. Ch. 3, ‘Elements of an alternative’, introduces G’s context-logical approach that features the replacement of truth conditions for sentences with assertibility conditions that are formulated in terms of G’s concept of the context. G assumes that any action in pursuit of a conversational goal may or may not accord with a set of sentences, or the context in G’s definition. The idea of assertibility in a context means that a sentence is assertible in a context if and only if it is a member of the set. The rest of the book concerns the application of this context-logical approach to formulating the assertibility conditions for complicated sentences (i.e. sentences that include logical devices, such as quantifiers, conditionals, truth predicates, the predicate ‘believes’, etc.). Ch. 4, ‘Domain of discourse’, reveals the inadequacy of the view that the speaker’s states of mind function as the sole determinant for the hearer to identify the referents of demonstrative phrases and the domains for quantifiers in the speaker’s sentences. Ch. 5, ‘Presupposition’, discusses problems for the pragmatic theory of presupposition, in particular, informative presupposition and presupposition coordination. Ch. 6, ‘Implicature’, questions the core idea in Gricean theory that the hearer can retrieve the meaning only by contemplating what is in the speaker’s mind. Ch. 7, ‘Quantification’, may be viewed as a nice solution to the validity asymmetry between universal instantiation and existential generalization. Ch. 8, ‘Conditionals’, shows how the context-logical approach can assure the validity of the inference in conditionals in a context in which it is uttered; Ch. 9, ‘Truth’, describes how the new approach avoids some famous semantic paradoxes and shows that no new paradoxes will arise within this approach. Ch. 10, ‘The communication conception’, argues that the account of belief attributions is the account of the nature of beliefs and desires. Ch. 11, ‘Explanation and prediction’, refutes the idea that human behaviors must be attributed to folk psychology. For example, one can also explain or predict the other’s behavior by straight induction or by his/her language competence. Ch. 12, ‘Semantics and ontology’, provides a semantic theory of belief attributions and ontological views on the nature of beliefs. This book will benefit scholars who are familiar and yet not satisfied with the standard solutions to the quandaries in the philosophy of language, but will still be accessible to readers with only elementary knowledge of first-order logic (thanks to the author’s effort to avoid philosophical verbosity and too many ‘isms’ in his narration). G’s brief introduction in the preface and his comparison of his ideas with current philosophical theories in the epilogue also help to facilitate readers’ understanding of the book. Xuelin He Guangdong Foreign Studies University Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

Presuppositions and Quantifier Domains

In this paper, I will argue for a new account of presuppositions which is based on double indexing as well as minimal representational contexts providing antecedent material for anaphoric presuppositions, rather than notions of context defined in terms of the interlocutors’ pragmatic presuppositions or the information accumulated from the preceding discourse. This account applies in particular to new phenomena concerning the presupposition of quantifier domains. But it is also intended to be an account of presuppositions in general. The account differs from the Satisfaction Theory and the Binding Theory of presuppositions in that it can be viewed as a conservative extension of traditional static semantics and in that it does not involve the notion of pragmatic presupposition.

Focus, presuppositions, and discourse restrictions

In their stimulating paper Bart Geurts and Rob van der Sandt (B&V) argue that whenever focusing gives rise to a background λx[φ(x)], there is a presupposition to the effect that λ[φ(x)] holds of some individual. This is their Background-Presupposition Rule (BPR). B&V show that the BPR in conjunction with the binding theory of presuppositions yields an elegant analysis of the projection behaviour of background information, including a solution for the so-called requantification problem. In addition, the BPR offers answers to several questions concerning focus particles. There are, however, other issues in the analysis of focus interpretation that B&V do not discuss. In particular, they ignore the question how focus background structure (FBS) restricts discourse positions. It is one of the basic observations of traditional research on information structure that different FBSs of a sentence S correspond to different discourse positions of utterances of S. For example, the German sentence (1)

In a Mediative Mood: The Semantics of the German Reportive Subjunctive

This paper aims at an account of the German “reportive subjunctive”, where the mood signals that the proposition is the object of an utterance report. The report can be explicit in the sentence or in the context, or more or less implicit. We interpret these uses as a more or less local verification or accommodation of a presupposition introduced by the subjunctive, thus accounting for a range of facts and contributing to the theory of presuppositions.

Deixis, binding and presupposition

Dynamic semantic accounts of presupposition have proven to quite successful improvements over earlier theories. One great advance has been to link presupposition and anaphora together (van der Sandt 92, Geurts 95), an approach that extends to integrate bridging and other discourse phenomena (Asher and Lascarides 1998a,b). In this extended anaphoric account, presuppositions attach, like assertions, to the discourse context via certain rhetorical relations. These discourse attachments constrain accommodation and help avoid some infelicitous predictions of standard accounts of presupposition. Further, they have interesting and complex interactions with underspecified conditions that are an important feature of the contributions of most presupposition triggers.
 
 Deictic uses of definites, on the other hand, seem at first glance to fall outside the purview of an anaphoric theory of presupposition. There seems to be little that a discourse based theory would have to say. I will argue, however, that a discourse based account can capture how these definites function in conversation. In particular such accounts can clarify the interaction between the uses of such deictic definites and various conversational moves. At least some deictic uses of definites generate presuppositions that are bound to the context via a rhetorical function that I'll call unchoring, which if successful entails a type of knowing how. If this anchoring function is accepted, then the acceptors know how to locate the referent of the definite in the present context. I'll concentrate here just on definites that refer to spatial locations, where the intuitions about anchoring are quite clear. But I think that this view extends to other deictic uses of definites and has ramifications for an analysis of de re attitudes as well.

Buoyancy and Strength

The chief characteristic of presuppositio ns is that they tend to take wide scope, yet most theories of presupposition, the author's not excepted, fail to provide an explanation of this fact. Recently, however, it has been suggested that a principled explanation can be given in terms of informativeness: the idea is that presuppositions simply prefer stronger readings to weaker ones. This proposal is studied in some depth, and is shown to lack solid empirical evidence. Furthermore, it is argued that assuming a preference for strong readings is either ad hoc, when restricted to presuppositio ns, or just false, when held to apply more widely. The paper leaves the main problem very much where it is, though some suggestions are made as to how the situation might be improved. Anaphoric pronouns may be used to refer back to an object introduced in the preceding discourse, but also to refer forward to an object yet to be introduced (the latter usage is sometimes called 'kataphora' or even 'cataphora'). This may be so, but a theory of anaphora that predicts only this much is seriously incomplete, because it does not account for the fact that forward reference is the exception and backward reference the rule. A theory that does not explain this preference is not much of a theory at all. Most of the phenomena a theory of interpretation has to deal with are like this. It would be very nice if we had theory that predicted all and only possible interpretations for any expression in any context; but it would hardly count as a full-fledged theory of interpretatio n. Small wonder, therefore, that the framework of optimality theory naturally suggests itself for dealing with a wide range of problems in semantics and pragmatics. One of the problems that immediately comes to mind is that of presuppositio n projection, not only because projection phenomena seem to spring from the interaction between several forces of varying strength, but also because that is precisely how many theories of presupposition treat their subject matter. Optimality-theoretic treatments of presuppositio n have been proposed by Zeevat (1999) and Blutner (this volume), and in the following I will assume that some account along these lines is the right one. What I will be worrying about is one of the constraints postulated by Blutner and Zeevat. Thus I will follow the lead of Haspelmath (2000), who argues that optimality-theoretic analyses are often incomplete, because they fail to motivate their constraints. Haspelmath restricts his discussion to phonology and syntax, where it is still possible just to postulate a set of constraints, and get away with it, but people working in semantics and pragmatics

Negation, ‘presupposition’ and metarepresentation: a response to Noel Burton-Roberts

Metalinguistic negation (MN) is interesting for at least the following two reasons: (a) it is one instance of the much broader, very widespread and various phenomenon of metarepresentational use in linguistic communication, whose semantic and pragmatic properties are currently being extensively explored by both linguists and philosophers of language; (b) it plays a central role in recent accounts of presupposition-denial cases, such as ‘The king of France is not bald; there is no king of France’. It is this latter employment that discussion of metalinguistic negation has focused on since Horn (1985)'s key article on the subject. While Burton-Roberts (1989a, 1989b) saw the MN account of presupposition-denials as providing strong support for his semantic theory of presupposition, I have offered a multi-layered pragmatic account of these cases, which also involves MN, but maintains the view that the phenomenon of presupposition is pragmatic (Carston 1994, 1996, 1998a).

Presuppositions and anaphors in attitude contexts

This paper consists of two main parts and a coda. In the first part I present the 'binding theory' of presupposition projection, which is the framework that I adopt in this paper (Section 1.1). I outline the main problems that arise in the interplay between presuppositions and anaphors on the one hand and attitude reports on the other (Section 1.2), and discuss Heim's theory of presuppositions in attitude contexts (Section 1.3). In the second part of the paper I present my own proposal. To begin with, I define an extension of DRT in which attitude reports can be represented (Sections 2.1–2.2). I then argue that the verb believe triggers a certain presupposition and that, given the binding theory, this presupposition determines the projection behaviour of the verb (Section 2.3). This analysis yields predictions which are incomplete in the sense that they do not fully account for speakers' intuitions about presuppositions and anaphors in belief contexts. In Section 2.4 I suggest that this is as it should be because we may assume on independent grounds that there is a class of plausibility inferences which complement the predictions of the presupposition theory. Finally, the analysis is extended to the verb want (Section 2.5). The paper concludes with a brief discussion of related phenomena in other domains: modals, quantifiers, and non-declarative speech acts (Section 3).

Good news about the description theory of names

This is an attempt at reviving Kneale's version of the description theory of names, which says that a proper name is synonymous with a definite description of the form 'the individual named so-and-so'. To begin with, I adduce a wide range of observations to show that names and overt definites are alike in all relevant respects. I then turn to Kripke's main objection against Kneale's proposal, and endeavour to refute it. In the remainder of the paper I elaborate on Kneale's analysis, adopting a theory of presupposition proposed by van der Sandt

Interpreting Presuppositions Using Active Logic: From Contexts to Utterances

Presuppositionis a pervasive feature of human language. It involves many interesting interactions between the utterances of a discourse and the contextof the discourse. In this paper we focus on issues of logical form connected with the interaction of presupposition and discourse context, and illustrate our theory with some implementational work using the active logicframework. After reviewing some of the major issues in presupposition theory we turn to a largely successful unified approach of Heim. We show how the main principles of this theory can be implemented in active logic. But we also find two serious difficulties. These consist in (a) a straightforward counterexample and (b) a type of discourse that we call a garden‐path discourse. We maintain that both the counterexample and the garden‐path type of discourse can be handled by our active‐logic version of Heim's theory. This requires us to reformulate and extend Heim's theorey. Although this work is largely theoretical, both Heim's theory and ours have important things to say about the incremental processing of the utterances that make up discourse. And we present our theory as a specification of a processing device that takes logical form of a sentence along with current discourse context as input and delivers an updated discourse context as output. As an experiment, we have implemented portions of this device.

On preservation under negation

Abstract Truth gap theories of presupposition are generally thought of as theories in which, by definition, the intuition that presuppositions are ‘preserved under negation’ is modeled by arranging for certain entailments of A (its presuppositions) to be logically necessitated by the-negation-of-A. The inevitability of this view of truth gap theories is questioned and arguments against making that arrangement are presented. An alternative is outlined: a truth gap theory, formulated without reference to negation, in which the intuition of preservation under negation is modelled and explained non-truth-conditionally and as the cognitive epiphenomenon of an underlying logic of presupposition.

Local satisfaction guaranteed: A presupposition theory and its problems

After an intermission that lasted for almost a decade, the past few years have witnessed a renewed interest in the notion of presupposition. The recent work in this area shows at least two major trends, one of which is fairly new, while the other has its roots in some of the earliest contributions on the subject. The new trend is the exploration of the links between presupposition and anaphora. This trend has received much of its impetus from van der Sandt's thesis that presuppositional and anaphoric expressions are in one and the same natural category, and are therefore amenable to a unified treatment. I shall come back to van der Sandt's theory towards the end of this paper, but in the following I am primarily concerned with the second trend, which is not necessarily consistent with the first. I am referring to the revival of what I propose to call the 'satisfaction theory' of presupposition. The ideas underlying the satisfaction theory go back to Stalnaker (1973, 1974) and Karttunen (1974). They were shaped into an explicit theory by Heim (1983), and have recently been taken up, e.g., by Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990), van Eijck (1991, 1993), Beaver (1992, 1993), Heim (1992), Krahmer (1993), and Krifka (1993). In the following I shall criticize the satisfaction theory, mainly on the grounds that the predictions it delivers are too weak. I feel justified in referring to the satisfaction theory of presupposition because my objections apply to all varieties that I know of. In fact, they apply to many other theories besides, such as Karttunen and Peters' (1979) and some logical presupposition theories

Le mécanisme des relations de réplique

H. Zeevat, Université d'Amsterdam : « Le mécanisme des relations de réplique » The paper discusses the laws by which the counterpart relation between objects in the world and the « objects » in the mind of a person (or between the « objects » in the mind of a person A and those in the mind of a person B) evolve under the influence of communication and perception. The results of this investigation are combined with a recent theory of presuppositions to obtain an alternative solution to Frege's problem in attitudinal contexts.