Abstract
The phenomenon of presupposition suspension can be analyzed in terms of explicatures and the corresponding non-presumptive interpretative reasoning underlying it. On the view presented in this paper, the polyphonic articulation of an utterance at different levels can be used to explain cases in which presuppositions are suspended. Presuppositional suspensions indicate that the presumptive reading does not hold and a different interpretation is needed. Utterances can display various types of polyphonic structures, accounting for the speaker’s and the hearer’s commitments. A speaker can be held directly responsible for what he says, but he is committed only indirectly to what he presupposes, i.e. what is uttered by a second voice (the second utterer or enunciator) representing what the common opinion accepts to be true. The reconstruction of the pragmatic structure of an utterance is guided by a complex type of reasoning, which can be represented as an argumentative abductive pattern, grounded on hierarchies of presumptions. By comparing the possible presumptions associated with the explicit meaning and the contextual information, the hearer can find a best possible explanation of the intended effect of the utterance.
Fabrizio Macagno would like to thank the Fundação para a Ciências e a Tecnologia for the research grants no. IF/00945/2013, PTDC/IVC-HFC/1817/2014, and PTDC/MHC-FIL/0521/2014.
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Notes
- 1.
As Jaszczolt (2010) claims, “Since the rise of radical pragmatics in the late 1970s, semantics has begun to grow to include not only the study of the meaning of the sentence, but also those aspects of meaning intended by the author (speaker, writer) of this sentence which transform sentence meaning into the speaker’s intended, explicit meaning or what is said.”
- 2.
Carston believes that in general the logical form cannot be equated with a full proposition, but we may concede that in a number of cases a minimal proposition is projected by a logical form.
- 3.
An explicature concerns the specific logical form of the proposition expressed by an utterance within a specific context. In this sense, an utterance takenout-of-context can be enriched only potentially with explicatures (Capone 2009). The potential explicature of (1): “Today it is raining” is “It is raining [HERE];” however, this explicature does not conflict with (1*):“Today it is raining, but not here.” (1*) is simply a different utterance, and is perfectly consistent with an interpretation in which there is no explicature and thus “but not here” does not cancel anything.
- 4.
As an extreme case, I could think of someone who is compelled to smoke, without his having such an intention; however, since he does not have this intention, he cannot stop smoking: as soon as the cigarette is pulled out of his mouth, he is no longer smoking, which is different from stopping smoking a cigarette.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
“Je signalerai enfin une perspective particulièrement prometteuse qui s’ouvre dès qu’on considère le sens comme un représentation de l’énonciation, représentation consistant notamment à y faire entendre la voix de divers énonciateurs s’adressant à divers destinataires et à identifier ces rôles illocutionnaires avec des personnages qui peuvent être, entre autres, ceux de l’énonciation. Il s’agit de la construction, dans le discours, du locuteur et de l’allocutaire. Psycho- et socio-linguistes ont quelquefois noté […] que l’on peut, en parlant, constituer une image de soi et de la personne à qui l’on parle, image que l’interlocuteur tantôt accepte et tantôt rejette. Un des principaux moyens de cette constitution est justement la possibilité, inscrite selon nous dans la langue, c'est-à-dire dans la signification des mots et des phrases, de faire s’exprimer différentes voix, en donnant l’instruction de les identifier à des êtres de la réalité –et en spécifiant même certaines contraintes à observer dans cette identification” (Ducrot 1980: 56).
- 8.
This non-presumptive reasoning can be also interpreted as a case of a parasitic use. The use is tolerated, despite the fact that it is ungrammatical. Yet Italians, in informal speech, do not perceive it as ungrammatical. Certainly there is ambivalence in usage and it is possible that in some contexts stronger meanings are accessed, while in other contexts (especially the least formal ones) the weaker meanings prevail. However, even on the TV programs and the news the weaker forms of “sapere” are attested. They are certainly used in a sense that is different from that of the English verb “to know.” Although the philosophical literature attests the use of “John knows that p but not p,” it only concedes that this is a parasitic, tolerated but ungrammatical usage.
- 9.
The Italian clitics tend to implicate that a proposition embedded in “sapere” (but also in other verbs such as “sentire,” “capire,” “immaginare,” “dire”) is true or anyway accepted by the speaker (and shared with the hearer). These seem to us to be uncontroversial cases where a presupposition is conversationally implicated. Now, apart from the case of “sapere,” where the presupposition is entailed and implicated (in the sense that loose, parasitic or weaker uses of “sapere” are excluded, since factivity is strongly implied), the other verbs mentioned (in Italian) do not seem to entail the truth of the embedded proposition. Thus a definitive result has been achieved for Italian, where the notion of presupposition seems to intersect with the notion of conversational implicature. Here the further problem that clitics usually tend to promote strong factive readings through inferences that appear to be not cancellable is resolved thanks to Capone’s previous considerations on the cancellability of explicatures/implicatures, not to mention the fact that contextual variation can prove that we are faced with conversational implicatures (See Capone 2000 and Capone 2013b on verbs of propositional attitude combined with pronominal clitics).
- 10.
As Kecskes (Forthcoming) says, “Commonalities, conventions, common beliefs, shared knowledge and the like all create a core common ground, a kind of collective salience on which intention and cooperation-based pragmatics is built. However, when this core common ground appears to be mostly missing or limited as is the case in intercultural communication interlocutors cannot take them for granted, rather they need to co-construct them, at least temporarily.”
- 11.
We would like to thank Dorota Zielińska who suggested us examples 19 and 20. See Zielinska 2013.
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Macagno, F., Capone, A. (2016). Presuppositions as Cancellable Inferences. In: Allan, K., Capone, A., Kecskes, I. (eds) Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43491-9_3
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