Theory Of Presupposition Projection Research Articles

Satisfied or exhaustified: an ambiguity account of the Proviso Problem

The presuppositions inherited from the consequent of a conditional or the second disjunct of a disjunction oscillate between a conditional and a non- conditional inference, depending on the context. This is problematic for most theories of presupposition projection in the literature, which only predict a condi- tional presupposition for such sentences (Karttunen 1974; Stalnaker 1973; Heim 1983; Beaver 2001; Schlenker 2009; Fox 2008 among others). The general response to this problem, the so-called ‘Proviso Problem’ (Geurts 1996), is to assume that in addition to the basic conditional presupposition, a non-conditional inference can arise depending on the relationship between the antecedent/first disjunct and the presupposition of the consequent/second disjunct. We discuss data for which this solution makes the wrong predictions. Similar data have been taken by van der Sandt (1992), Geurts (1996) and Garcia-Odon (2012) to motivate the DRT-approach to presuppositions. Schlenker (2011), however, has raised various arguments against such an approach. We propose an alternative analysis, which doesn’t have those problems. In our analysis, the differing presuppositions are the result of a systematic ambiguity involving exhaustification in a trivalent semantics: a non-conditional presupposition obtains with exhaustification, and a conditional one without. In- dependently motivated plausibility considerations decide which reading is chosen with no direct selection of presuppositions needed. We discuss how this approach deals with the various cases of proviso and the predictions it makes for biconditional sentences.

A New Predictive Theory of Presupposition Projection

No abstract.

Presuppositions, provisos, and probability

Theories of presupposition in the tradition associated with Karttunen, Stalnaker and Heim relate presupposition satisfaction to the content of conversational participants’ epistemic states, usually modeled as sets of worlds. However, converging evidence from recent work on modality and from other areas of cognitive science suggests that epistemic states are better thought of as having the richer structure of probability distributions. I describe an account of semantic and pragmatic presupposition which combines core ideas from dynamic semantic treatments with a probabilistic model of information states and their dynamics in conversation, and argue that it predicts the core data of the proviso problem (Geurts 1996) without invoking ad hoc mechanisms as conditional strengthening accounts typically do. The frequently cited intuition that (ir)relevance is crucial follows without stipulation, and I present new cases which suggest that irrelevance is too weak to predict all cases of unconditional presuppositions, problematizing strengthening accounts which rely on it. The proposed theory is able to account for this new data and also for semi-conditional presuppositions, a sticking point for previous theories of presupposition projection. I argue that this perspective also gives us a reasonable line on several related issues, including the divergence between presupposed conditionals and conditional presuppositions, instances of the proviso problem in counterfactuals, and the contextual variation in the difficulty of accommodation. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.2 BibTeX info

Presupposition Projection: Two Theories of Local Contexts Part I

How do complex sentences inherit the presuppositions of their parts? This is the problem of presupposition projection. An old idea is that the presupposition of an elementary expression must be entailed by the context in which it is evaluated; the relevant notion of context is, as a first approximation, what is ‘common ground’ between the speech act participants. We survey two theories of presupposition projection which are crucially based on the idea that there are more contexts than meets the eye. In addition to the ‘global context’, both theories posit that an expression has a ‘local context’ which aggregates information provided by earlier parts of the discourse together with the global context. The key idea is that the presupposition of an elementary expression must be entailed by its local context. But how are local contexts computed? Heim’s dynamic semantics departs from the standard view of meaning as truth conditions, and takes the very meaning of words to be instructions to change the context (Heim 1983). This framework makes it possible to define empirically adequate lexical entries for a variety of operators, but it has often been considered to be insufficiently explanatory. An alternative is to stick to the standard view of meaning as truth conditions, and to reconstruct local contexts on the basis of a classical (bivalent, non-dynamic) semantics (Schlenker 2009, 2010). We discuss conceptual and empirical issues that might distinguish between the two frameworks, as well as some data that are problematic for both. A final section offers a comparison between approaches based on local contexts, and an influential alternative, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) (Geurts 1999; van der Sandt 1992). (The article is divided into two parts: Part I introduces the problem of presupposition projection and presents Heim’s theory. Part II lays out the non-dynamic reconstruction of local contexts, and sketches a comparison with DRT.)

Two short notes on Schlenker's theory of presupposition projection

Two short notes on Schlenker's theory of presupposition projection

When satisfaction is not enough. Comments on Schlenker's ‘Be Articulate. A pragmatic theory of presupposition projection’

Article When satisfaction is not enough. Comments on Schlenker's ‘Be Articulate. A pragmatic theory of presupposition projection’ was published on December 1, 2008 in the journal Theoretical Linguistics (volume 34, issue 3).

Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution

The present paper presents an anaphoric account of presupposition. It is argued that presuppositional expressions should not be seen as referring expressions, nor is presupposition to be explicated in terms of some non-standard logic. The notion of presupposition should not be relegated to a pragmatic theory either. Instead presuppositional expressions are claimed to be anaphoric expressions which have internal structure and semantic content. In fact they only differ from pronouns and other semantically less loaded anaphors in that they have more descriptive content. It is this fact which enables them to create an antecedent in case discourse does not provide one. If their capacity to accommodate is taken into account they can be treated by basically the same mechanism which handles the resolution of pronouns. The theory is elaborated in the framework of discourse representation theory. It is shown that pragmatic factors interfere in the resolution of presuppositio nal anaphors. The resulting account can neither be classified as wholly semantic nor wholly pragmatic. Section 1 presents a survey of standing problems in the theory of presupposition projection and discusses the major competing approaches. An argumentation for a purely anaphoric account of presupposition is given in section 2. Section 3 presents a coding of presuppositional expressions in an extension of discourse representation theory. The final section is devoted to a discussion of the constraints which govern the resolution of presuppositional anaphors.