Abstract
This paper, originally published in 2001, deals with the question of the source of presuppositions, focusing on the question of whether presuppositions are conventional properties of linguistic expressions, or arise as inferences derivable from ordinary content in combination with some general conversational principles. I argue that at least some presuppositions should be analysed as conversational inferences, on the grounds that they show two of the hallmarks of such inferences: contextual defeasibility and nondetachability. I make this case for the presuppositions associated with change of state predicates and with factives. I argue further for the need for a general principle for deriving presuppositions as inferences by illustrating a variety of cases of presupposition-like inferences not clearly involving a lexical presupposition trigger. In the second half of the paper, I move towards the development of a general conversational account of the relevant presuppositions. Building on a brief comment in Stalnaker (1974), I develop the following pair of ideas: first, that an utterance embedding a proposition P may be seen as raising the question whether P; and second, that P may be related to a further proposition Q in such a way that it would make sense to raise the question whether P only if one already believed Q to be true. It is these required prior beliefs that constitute conversationally derived presuppositions. Although the account developed here is only a preliminary attempt, the relevance of contextually salient questions, or sets of alternatives, to an account of presupposition has been taken up in subsequent work, notably Abusch (2010) and Simons et al. (2010).
This paper was originally presented at Semantics and Linguistic Theory 11, held at NYU in 2001, and was published in the conference proceedings (R. Hastings, B. Jackson and Z. Zvolensky, eds., Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 11, Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications: 431–448.) It is reprinted here with only very minor additions and modifications. Most of these appear in footnotes below. Footnotes which have been added for this reprinting are prefaced with the notation (2011).
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Notes
- 1.
Kay adds with regret that his own study “will unfortunately make no improvement on this practice”.
- 2.
We also attribute presuppositions to specific constructions, in particular it-clefts and wh-clefts. But it is particularly problematic to think of these presuppositions as conventional, given the assumption that there is neither a “lexicon” of constructions, nor any construction-specific syntactic rules. If there is no rule for the formation of clefts, then there is nothing to which to attach the conventional rule that a cleft has a presupposition. (This observation is due to Sally McConnell-Ginet.)
- 3.
(2011) When I originally wrote this paper, I was shockingly ignorant about the prior literature, particularly that from the 1970s and early 1980s, containing related arguments and views. It was for that reason that the original version contained no references to that literature, a serious omission which I am happy to remedy here.
- 4.
(2011) While one might be inclined to talk about suppression or cancelation of the presupposition in this case, note that the typically projective content does not just “go away”; rather, it makes only a local semantic contribution under the scope of the question operator. (See Tonhauser et al. 2011).
- 5.
Notice that this sentence does not have the usual form of a presupposition-canceling conjunction. Cancellation is expected when the first conjunct entails the presupposition of the second, which is not the case here. This type of sentence is, however, reminiscent of examples with but due to Liberman (1973), such as:
-
1.
Perhaps John has no children, but perhaps his children are away on vacation.
Liberman offers his examples as counterexamples to the standard characterization of projection patterns. I think in fact that these examples involve cancellation in the face of explicit ignorance. The first clause indicates that the speaker is not sure whether John has children, and thus has the same effect as the first clause in my example.
-
1.
- 6.
An exception must be made here for Manner implicatures.
- 7.
(2011) A related point is that some investigations indicate that presuppositions are largely stable across languages. So, for example, in other languages which have a lexical item with the meaning stop, use of that item tends to give rise to the start-state implication. However, there has not really been enough systematic study of presuppositions across languages to make a definitive claim. For some preliminary work, see Levinson and Annamalai 1992 and Tonhauser et al. 2011.
- 8.
These points echo the arguments given in Atlas and Levinson 1981, who made the same observations about defeasibility and nondetachability. They do not, though, make the distinction I have indicated here between different kinds of presupposition triggers.
- 9.
(2011) In light of the observations here about the effects of intonation, I would now be inclined to think that this class of cases is to be explained as an effect of semantic focus. Abrusán (2012) gives convincing arguments to this effect with respect to parallel effects in Hungarian. However, the data discussed in the remainder of this section do not involve focus effects.
- 10.
This observation is due to Tom Werner.
- 11.
In addition, whatever is “scoped out” tends to be interpreted as “backgrounded,” as is usual with presupposition. I will have nothing further to say about this here.
- 12.
These readings become available with the right placement of focal stress.
- 13.
Non-restrictive relatives are another source of projecting entailments, as has been pointed out in the literature. (See Wilson and Sperber 1979 and Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990.) Utterance of either (i) or (ii) commits the speaker to the claim that Jane was hiding in the closet.
-
(i)
I didn’t see Jane, who was hiding in the closet.
-
(ii)
Did you see Jane, who was hiding in the closet?
Similarly, in sentences with secondary predication, the primary predication projects. Thus, utterance of either (iii) or (iv) implies that the speaker believes that Cleo came home.
-
(iii)
Cleo didn’t come home drunk.
-
(iv)
Did Cleo come home drunk?
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(i)
- 14.
It is worth noting that Stalnaker himself here invokes speaker beliefs, not speaker presuppositions, as a condition on appropriate utterance.
- 15.
This is an idea which originates in the work of Carlson (1983), who suggested that sentence topics be treated as questions which are answered by utterances of that sentence. The idea has since been pursued by a variety of researchers. See, among others, Ginzburg (1994), van Kuppevelt (1995), and Roberts (1996); see also Simons (2000).
- 16.
This is not a logical entailment, but a contextual entailment, in the sense of Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990). It follows given what we know about the world and about how voting works.
- 17.
This problem was pointed out to me by Roger Schwarzschild.
- 18.
This notion of preconditions on events is to be distinguished from preconditions on the truth and falsity of sentences. I claim, for example, that Jane’s laughing immediately before t is a precondition on the event of her stopping laughing. However, this claim does not entail any commitments as to whether the sentence Jane didn’t stop laughing (at t) is true, false, or truth valueless in a situation in which the precondition is not met.
- 19.
(2011) For a different way of utilizing implicit questions in an account of projection, see Simons et al. (2010)
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Simons, M. (2013). On the Conversational Basis of Some Presuppositions. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_13
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