Presupposition and implicatures

We now turn our attention to two types of meaning that are often characterised as pragmatic, beginning with presuppositions.

Presuppositions are often analysed as definedness or admittance conditions (Frege, 1892;

Strawson, 1950; Heim, 1983; Beaver, 2001; Heim and Kratzer, 1998). As such, they impose con-straints on the contexts in which the sentences from which they arise can be used. Technically, the admittance condition view requires the context to entail the content of the presupposition for the sentence carrying the presupposition to be admitted as an update of the context (Heim,

ordering sourceg, i.e. that theLimit Assumptionholds (Lewis, 1973; Stalnaker, 1987). The semantics of the ordering relation is shown below in (55) (Kratzer, 1981; Portner, 2009). What (a) states is that a worldwwill be better or at least as good as a worldzwith respect to an ordering sourceXiff all propositions ofX that are true atzare also true atw (and perhaps more). The operatorBestin (b) returns the set of worldswwhere the most propositions of the ordering sourceXare true (Portner, 2009).

(i) Ordering

For any set of propositionsX and any worldsw,z∈W:

a. w≤Xz(wis at least as good asz) iff{p|p∈X∧z∈p} ⊆ {p|p∈X∧w∈p} b. Best_g(w)(∩f(w)) =λw⁰.w⁰≤g(w)w

20Warm thanks to David Beaver for suggesting this connection.

1983).²¹ If this requirement is not satisfied, the update process is halted; in this case, either the update is simply discarded, or the presupposition isaccommodated, i.e. spontaneously added to the common ground (Lewis, 1979; Heim, 1983, 1990), so that the attempted update can proceed normally. For example, consider the sentenceMy dog is furry. Under the definedness condition view, if I utterMy dog is furry, the truth-value of the sentence will be defined only if I have a dog.

However, I can usemy dognaturally even when the context does not yet entail that I have a dog.

In this case, my hearer has to accommodate the required piece of information, and proceed to interpret my utterance in a new, ‘repaired’ context.

Another way to view presupposition is due to Stalnaker (1973, 1974, 1978, 1999, 2002), for whom presupposition is a property of the speaker, and not a sentence. Under this view, speaker presuppositions correspond to those propositions whose truth the speaker takes for granted (Stal-naker, 1973). In other words, presupposing can be conceived of as a propositional attitude that holds between a speaker and a proposition. At best, propositions havepresupposition require-ments, which dictate the presuppositional conditions under which utterances may be used ap-propriately. Under this view, a speaker who utters sentenceMy dog is furry presupposes the propositionp=that I have a dog"just in case he is disposed to act, in his linguistic behaviour, as if he takes the truth ofp for granted, and as if he assumes that his audience recognises that he is doing so" (Stalnaker, 1973, p. 448). The ‘acting as if’ allows the speaker to actually communicate presuppositions that they take to be false.²² More interestingly for our purposes, as a result of a speaker acting as if the truth ofp can be taken for granted – i.e. that it is common ground be-tween the discourse participants thatp is true –p in fact becomes common ground, unless the other discourse participants have reason to doubt the speaker’s authority onp. This means that speakers may introduce new information to the common ground by essentially forcing other dis-course participants into an accommodation process. This type of presupposition is sometimes calledinformative presupposition; indeed, for Stalnaker (1973, p. 449), "the central[informative]

purpose of making a statement may be to communicate a presupposition which is required by a statement". Thus, under Stalnaker’s view, accommodation can be seen a process of adjusting the common ground so as to get the presuppositions of all discourse participants to align.

A third way of viewing presuppositions is in terms of anaphora and binding (Sandt, 1992;

Geurts, 1999). The detailed discussion of this approach is left for section 3.3.1, where some anal-yses of additivity that rely on this view are presented. Indeed, all three types of approaches to presupposition are used in the analysis of additivity: while additive presuppositions are in most cases analysed as definedness or admittance conditions, analyses based on the binding approach (van der Sandt and Geurts, 2001; Geurts and van der Sandt, 2004) and the speaker

presupposi-21On the dynamic semantics view, the meaning of a sentence consists in itscontext change potential. The context (or more precisely, the common ground) is a body of information, and that body of information can be potentially changed by each incoming update. Formally, a context change potential is thus a function from contexts to contexts (Heim, 1983).

22This means that technically, the common ground may contain information that some discourse participants only pretend to accept as true.

2.2. Semantics-pragmatics

tion view (Kapitonov, 2012) also exist. The proposal that is put forth in this dissertation is couched within the speaker presupposition approach. While additives themselves carry no presupposi-tions on this view (at best, they impose a presupposition requirement, as mentioned above), I will nevertheless sometimes talk as if they did (especially in chapters that precede the actual analysis in 5). This way of talking about additives is also used when discussing analyses that do not rely on a Stalnakerian approach to presupposition in chapter 3.

Generally, presuppositions – regardless of how they are analysed specificallycally – are set apart from other types of meaning, such as truth-conditional meaning and conversational im-plicatures (Grice, 1975), by the use of projection tests(Karttunen, 1973; Beaver, 2001; Simons et al., 2010). For example, presuppositions are unaffected by negation (i.e. theyprojectpast it unchanged): thus, (the use of ) the negative (56a) still presupposes that the speaker has a dog.

Accordingly, Karttunen classifies negation apresupposition hole. Modals, antecedents of condi-tionals, and questions also function as presupposition holes, and all examples in (56) thus share the same presupposition: that the speaker has a dog.

(56) Presupposition projection a. My dogis not furry b. My dogmight be sick

c. Ifmy dogis sick, I need to take it to the vet d. Ismy dogsick?

Presuppositions are also, to a large extent, uncancellable – although they may be filtered out in contexts where their content isentailed(e.g. within a conjunction) (Karttunen, 1973). Some pre-suppositions do, however, seem to differ from each other in whether they may be defeated or not. Abusch (2010) classifies expressions that trigger presuppositions intohardandsofttriggers, where presuppositions from the former are impossible to defeat, and those arising from the latter may be defeated in some contexts. For example, it has been argued that the additive presupposi-tion of non-scalar additive focus particles such astoois hard, while the additive presupposition that often accompanies scalar focus particles such asevenis soft:

(57) Soft vs. hard triggers: Additive presupposition

a. I’m not sure if Laura is here. # If Susanna is here, too, then...

b. I’m not sure if Laura is here. If even Susanna is here, then...

In (57a), the additivetootriggers roughly the presupposition that it must be the case that someone else besides Susanna is there. Given that no such piece of knowledge has been established (as is explicitly stated in the preceding sentence), the use oftoois supposedly infelicitous. Witheven, however, the additive inference seems to be defeatable: the use ofevenis felicitous in (57b).

In contrast to presuppositions, which are tied to specific lexical elements and typically (but not universally, as we have seen above) refer to information that is backgrounded and taken for granted, implicatures may or may not be tied to a lexical element, and typically provide new in-formation. The general Gricean tradition (Grice, 1975) distinguishes between conventional and conversational implicatures, where the former are always associated with a linguistic convention – i.e. a specific form – and the latter are either generalised, and therefore also associated with a linguistic form, or particularised, in which case they arise simply from context-based reasoning concerning the speaker’s communicative intentions.²³ A paradigmatic example of conventional implicature is the sense of contrast or incompatibility expressed by the connectivebutin (58):

the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence is that Mary is rich and Mary is unhappy, and the part of the meaning that indicates that richness and unhappiness usually do not go together is brought in via the use ofbut (as can be shown by observing the disappearance of this inference whenbutin (58) is replaced withand). Conventional implicatures are thus tied to specific lexical elements.

(58) Conventional implicature:but

Mary is rich but unhappy [ Richness and unhappiness contrast] Conventional implicatures and generalised conversational implicatures both arise from the use of specific lexical expressions. However, conventional implicatures may never be cancelled, whereas generalised conversational implicatures may. One example of generalised conversational impli-cature comes from the quantifiersome(Horn, 1972; Grice, 1975; Levinson, 2000; Geurts, 2010).

Whensomeis used, it is mostly understood as implying the falsity of a corresponding universal statement; in other words,someis interpreted assome but not all. This inference is standardly called ascalar implicature. On the Gricean view, the scalar implicature (not all) arises from the hearer’s reasoning on the speakers intentions: the speaker could have used the logically stronger all, but did not. Hence, there is probably some reason that they did not; perhaps, for example, usingallwould have lead to a false statement. In (59), for example, the scalar implicature of the sentence is that not all students have red hats. Crucially, in some contexts, this implicature does not arise (cf. conventional implicatures, which are always present). This is the case when the speaker can be assumed to not be able to know whether all students have red hats, for example.

Moreover, as mentioned above, the scalar implicature may be overtly contradicted or cancelled by a continuation such asIn fact, all students have red hatsfor (59).

(59) Generalised conversational implicature (scalar implicature):some

Some students have red hats [ Not all students have red hats]

23Note that conventional implicatures may also project. Simons et al. (2010) propose that projection is a property of non-at-issue meaning, which encompasses both presupposition and conventional implicature.