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An Information Packaging Approach to Presuppositions and Conventional Implicatures

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Abstract

Within the relevant semantics and pragmatics literature the terms “presupposition” and “conventional implicature” are used in a variety of different, but frequently overlapping, ways. The overlaps are perhaps not surprising, given that the two categories of conveyed meaning share the property of remaining constant in the scope of other operators—the property (Tonhauser et al. in Language 89:66–109, 2013) usefully characterize as projectivity. One of my purposes in this paper will be to try to clarify these different usages. In addition to that we will explore two additional properties which are shared by some of these projective contents—strong contextual felicity (Tonhauser et al. in Language 89:66–109, 2013), and neutralizability (Abbott in Drawing the boundaries of meaning: Neo-Gricean studies in pragmatics and semantics in honor of Laurence R. Horn. John Benjamins, Philadelphia, 2006). The idea is to try to explain all three properties by taking into account information packaging.

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Notes

  1. Or necessitated. If presupposition failure results in lack of a truth value for the presupposing sentence (as believed by many people, in addition to Frege and Strawson), then the relation between that sentence and its presuppositions can’t be classical entailment, since modus tollens would no longer hold in this case. I will continue to use the terms “entail” and “entailment”, assuming this proviso.

  2. The useful term “at-issue”, in this sense, originated with Bill Ladusaw in classes he taught at UC Santa Cruz in the 1990’s. Its spread has been aided by some of his students [e.g. Chris Barker (e.g. 1999) and Chris Potts (e.g. 2005)].

  3. Larry Horn has reminded me that a number of scholars (e.g. Neale 1999, Predelli 2003) have argued that what is conveyed by therefore may indeed be at-issue in some cases, but I don’t know that I am convinced. I will continue to use therefore as one example of a conventional implicature, and hope that it does not affect any of my important claims in this paper.

  4. There is another proposition associated with definite descriptions, and that is that their descriptive content applies uniquely to an entity in the relevant universe of discourse. Horn and Abbott (2012) argue that this proposition is not entailed, and is thus a conventional implicature rather than a presupposition. We will return to the uniqueness implicature briefly below.

  5. These tables are revised versions of Tables 1 and 2 in Abbott (2006).

  6. Tonhauser et al. investigated another property which they termed “obligatory local effect”, having to do with the preservation of projective content under the scope of other operators. We will not be concerned with that property here.

  7. The ordinary, every day senses of the word “presuppose” are (according to my American Heritage dictionary): “1. To believe or suppose in advance. 2. To require or involve necessarily as an antecedent.” I can’t help but feel that the use of the terms “presuppose” and “presupposition” has encouraged the widespread but obviously false belief that, in order for an utterance to be felicitous, its presuppositions must belong to the common ground. We shall see that this is true for only some cases—definitely not all.

  8. There are, of course, complications for this claim. Conjunctions and disjunctions present two of them. See Abbott (2000), n. 7, p. 1431f, for discussion.

  9. Some comments in Simons et al. (2013) suggest that this view is being revised, by at least some of the authors. Cf. note 9, p. 9. See also Simons et al. (2014).

  10. Perhaps this is a good place to make clear that I have reservations about the QUD approach to discourse, and specifically, any requirement that there always be a QUD. Discourse initial utterances, for example, seem to present a problem for such a requirement.

  11. I have to confess that at times, this explanation seems too hand-wavy to me.

  12. See also some related ideas in Horn (1981), Abusch (2002), and Simons (2003).

  13. Larry Horn (p.c.) has objected to my claim that these pairs are very similar. Once again, I’m not sure that I’m convinced.

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Philosophy Department, at the University of Texas, Austin, and I would like to thank that audience for their helpful comments. Larry Horn also read an earlier version, and gave me some very useful comments. This paper draws heavily on prior papers of mine, each of which acknowledges the many comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc. from other people which have improved its content. Probably I should repeat all those acknowledgements here, but I’m not going to.

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    Barbara Abbott

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Abbott, B. An Information Packaging Approach to Presuppositions and Conventional Implicatures. Topoi 35, 9–21 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9285-0

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