Discourse Analysis 2011

PRESUPPOSITIONS II

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Some trigger terminology

example terminology

the king of France definite descriptions

to know (epistemic) factives

to regret (emotive) factives

to stop aspectual predicates

again iteratives

to manage implicative predicates

after... temporal clauses

It was ... who cleft sentences

every quantifiers

bachelor special restricted predicates

Julius Seidensticker names

HE intonation

A semantic definition

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A semantic definition

One sentence presupposes another iff whenever the first sentence is true, the second is true, and whenever the negation of the first sentence is true, the second sentence is true.

(based on Strawson 1950)

Basic intuition: Presuppositions are insensitive to negation.

Problem 1: If negation is the defining criterion we will miss out on phenomena that very much look like presuppositions but that regretfully occur in sentences that cannot be negated.

Problem 2: Presuppositions don’t always seem to be insensitive to negation.

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A semantic definition

Problem 2: Presuppositions don’t always seem to be insensitive to negation.

The king of France isn’t bald...

...there ISN’T any king of France.

If presuppositions were always insensitive to negation, we would expect the overt denial in the negation case to be as unacceptable as the overt denial in the positive case:

The king of France is bald...# ...there ISN’T any king of France.

A pragmatic definition

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A pragmatic definition

A presupposition associated with a sentence is a condition that a speaker would normally expect to hold in the common ground between discourse participants when that sentence is uttered.

> If there is any reason to assume that the condition doesn’t hold, the presupposition is cancelled.

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Cancelling presuppositions: the procedure

> The cancellation procedure:

Implicatures and entailments as well as background assumptions and contextual factors defeat potential presuppositions, so a hearer adds to his or her commitments only those presuppositions that are compatible with all background assumptions, contextual factors and all implicatures and entailments. All remaining potential presuppositions are cancelled.

All presuppositions start life as potential presuppositions.

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Cancelling presuppositions: exercises

What potential presuppositions do the following constructions give rise to?

-> List them, indicate what the presupposition trigger is and try to categorize the trigger in one of the categories we have established.

exercise 4, p.92

-> Why are these presuppositions cancelled? Explain in your own words.

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Manchester United didn’t regret losing the game, because in fact they won!

>> MU lost the game emotive factiveregret

Dr Smith left the university before being promoted to an associate professor.

>> Dr Smith was promoted to an associate professor

temporal clausebefore

overt denial

world knowledge: one doesn’t get promoted after having left the university

Cancelling presuppositions: exercises

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You say that somebody in this room fancies Henry. Well, it isn’t Mary who fancies Henry, it isn’t Lucy, and it certainly isn’t Jane. In fact, nobody in this room fancies Henry!

>> somebody fancies Henry cleft sentenceit isn’t...

John doesn’t know that Neil Armstrong was the first man to travel in space.

>> Neil Armstrong was the first man to travel in space

epistemic factiveknow

reduction arguments

world knowledge: Yuri Gagarin was the first man to travel in space (Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon)

Cancelling presuppositions: exercises

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John was in his office when the news was announced, if it was in fact ever announced.

>> the news was announced temporal clausewhen

He is proud that he is the tsar of Russia, but of course there isn’t any such tsar anymore.

>> He is the tsar of Russia

emotive factiveproud

explicit suspension

overt denial

Cancelling presuppositions: exercises

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If Cambridge wins the boat race, John will be happy that Cambridge is the winner.

>> Cambridge wins the boat race emotive factivehappy

cancelled by the implicature that Cambridge might not win the boat race

Cancelling presuppositions: exercises

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A closer look at the cancellation procedure

Implicatures and entailments as well as background assumptions and contextual factors defeat presuppositions, so a hearer adds to his or her commitments only those presuppositions that are compatible with all background assumptions, contextual factors and all implicatures and entailments. All remaining presuppositions are cancelled. > order neutral version

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A closer look at the cancellation procedure

Cancellation must proceed in a fixed order of priority:> Background assumptions> Contextual factors> Semantic entailments> Conversational implicatures> Presuppositions

First the relevant background assumptions are placed in the context, then the contextual information is added, then the entailments of what is said, then the conversational implicatures, and only finally the presuppositions.

To some extent it’s conceptually unattractive to add presuppositions – which are intuitively ‘given’ information – last.

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A closer look at the cancellation procedure

Van der Sandt’s reformulation of the cancellation model (cf. Van der Sandt 1982, 1988) might offer a conceptually more attractive solution:

Add only those presuppositions that could be conjoined to the beginning of the sentence while leaving the utterance consistent with background assumptions, contextual factors, ...

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A closer look at cancellation itself (1)

If someone in the linguistics department won the research grant, it was John who won it.

If someone in the linguistics department won the research grantimplicature

the speaker is not sure that it is someone in the linguistics department who won the research grant

it was John who won the research grant

potential presupposition

somebody won the research grant

The implicature is not inconsistent with the potential presupposition. The latter should therefore – contrary to fact – not get cancelled.

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A closer look at cancellation itself (2)

The king of France isn’t bald...

The king of France is bald...# ...there ISN’T any king of France.

...there ISN’T any king of France.

> For some reason, overt denial is straightforward with negation but not without it. This seems to suggest that cancellation is not a unified phenomenon.

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A pragmatic definition: conclusion

> We have seen that a cancellation analysis of presuppositions is fruitful.

> We have seen that – as it stands – a cancellation analysis is not without counterexamples.

> We have seen that there are differences between cancellation of presuppositions in positive and in negative propositions. This seems to suggest that cancellation is not as unified a phenomenon as it might seem at first sight.

Back to 1973

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Karttunen 1973: question 1

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Karttunen 1973: question 2

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Karttunen 1973: questions 3 and 4

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Karttunen 1973: question 5

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Karttunen 1973: question 6

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Karttunen 1973: question 7

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Karttunen 1973: question 8

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Karttunen 1973: questions 9 and 10

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Karttunen 1973: question 11

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Karttunen 1973: question 12

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Karttunen 1973: question 13

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Karttunen 1973: question 14

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A small complication

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A small complication

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Discussion

> Karttunen tried to pursue a purely semantic analysis of presuppositions but does recognize the role of context (speaker’s beliefs). It therefore qualifies as a mixed analysis (semantic/pragmatic).

> Karttunen differs from Gazdar in that he assumes presupposition never get cancelled, they simply don’t always project to the level of the compound sentence.

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Discussion

“However, there are problems for this analysis. From a conceptual point of view, the positing of plugs, holes and filters seems largely to be arbitrarily stipulated than independently motivated, thus lacking explanatory power.”“Somewhat related is the problem that under this analysis, negation is forced to be treated as ambiguous: descriptive negation as a hole but metalinguistic negation as a plus.”

> How arbitrary is the division Karttunen proposes?

Admittedly, filters are weird things but once we put these aside it’s just plugs that are special. During the reading of the paper we concluded that their behaviour is not really surprising.

> The problem of negation is of course a real one but quite some people accept this cost.

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Discussion

“Turning next to empirical considerations, counterexamples are not hard to find. First of all, a presupposition embedded under a plug, for example, can sometimes survive unscathed...”

> Churchill said that he would never regret being tough with Stalin.

Is it really true that the sentence as a whole presupposes that Churchill was tough with Stalin? If so, this is a very subtle judgement.

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Discussion

“Next, the filtering conditions also make wrong predictions...”

> It’s possible that John has children and it’s possible that his children are away.

True but this is a detail of the analysis that is concerned with his children referring to the children that have been hinted at before: “It’s possible that John has children and it’s possible that these children are away”. This prediction doesn’t pose a real threat to the enterprise that Karttunen is undertaking.

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Discussion

“Finally, the filtering-satisfaction theory cannot accommodate defeasibility of presupposition...”

> There is no king of France. Therefore the king of France isn’t bald.

As we saw at the very end, Karttunen was considering to include ways of allowing certain presuppositions not to project. The fact that this is not completely worked out doesn’t mean that it would be undoable. What is clear though is that a story that doesn’t take into account the context (speaker’s beliefs) will not be sufficient.

Exercises

Heim 1982/1992

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The gist of Heim’s proposal

> A sentence (or part thereof) can only be felicitously uttered if its presuppositions are entailed by what precedes the sentence.

John’s children didn’t come.

> Can only be uttered if it’s clear from what precedes that John has children.

> Presuppositions are those pieces of information that have to be assumed to be able to felicitously utter a sentence.

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Comparison with Gazdar and Karttunen

> What distinguishes Heim from Gazdar is that Heim doesn’t allow presuppositions to get cancelled.

> Heim resembles Karttunen in assuming that presuppositions cannot get cancelled.

Every presupposition has to be satisfied by the preceding context.

She takes Karttunen’s idea that context plays an important role to the next level by working out a model where this is not only implemented for filters but for all presuppositions.

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To the rescue of Karttunen

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To the rescue of Karttunen

Stalnaker 1974 (worked out in Heim 1992)

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A problem...

> A sentence (or part thereof) can only be felicitously uttered if its presuppositions are entailed by what precedes the sentence.

> What to do with examples like the following:

> Assuming that the information that the new guy has a wife is new, it would seem that Bob’s utterance has to be infelicitous. This is contrary to fact.

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A solution...

> People are very cooperative and to a certain extent they are willing to accommodate information that hasn’t been mentioned before.

> Accommodation

A process whereby contexts are adjusted so as to make update possible when presuppositions are not entailed by the preceding context.

Summary so far

Semantics

Pragmatics

meaning bits that are insensitive to negation

meaning bits that one normally assumes to be the case for a sentence to be uttered felicitously

Karttunenmeaning bits that have a very intricate sensitivity pattern: they are always there but they needn’t make it to the highest level

Heimmeaning bits that have to be in the context for a sentence to be uttered felicitously

presupposition

presupposition trigger

projection problem

plug, hole, filter

potential presupposition

actual presupposition

cancellation procedure

accommodation

A radical alternative

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A radical alternative

> Presuppositions don’t exist.

> They are entailments.

> Main challenge: to explain why a standard entailment is never seen as something that has to be the case for a sentence to be felicitously uttered whereas presuppositions are.

> This is a role for pragmatics...

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A worked-out example

(Simons 2005 working out the account by Atlas 2005)

Summary

Semantics

Pragmatics

meaning bits that are insensitive to negation

meaning bits that one normally assumes to be the case for a sentence to be uttered felicitously

Karttunenmeaning bits that have a very intricate sensitivity pattern: they are always there but they needn’t make it to the highest level

Heimmeaning bits that have to be in the context for a sentence to be uttered felicitously

Radical Pragmaticsentailments with extensive pragmatics

Exercises