Pragmatic Presuppositions

Abstract

Argues that the distinction between what is asserted and what is presupposed in a statement should be described and explained pragmatically, in terms of what the speaker takes to be the background information, or common ground, shared between speaker and audience. The pragmatic notion of presupposition is used to explain two kinds of linguistic facts: first, facts about the relation between the presuppositions required by complex sentences and the presuppositions required by their constituent sentences (the projection problem) and second, facts about the behaviour of different kinds of factive verbs.

Presupposition projection from the scope of None: Universal, existential, or both?

“…1 The influential view of presuppositions advanced by Stalnaker 1970Stalnaker , 1974Karttunen 1974;Heim 1983 sees them as admittance conditions on the assertion of the relevant sentence. We use the term 'inference' broadly here to include various aspects of meaning associated with a sentence, including potential cases of (global) accommodation; see Chemla 2009a for discussion.…”

Presupposition and Implicature

“…As I mentioned in Section 2.1, Stalnaker (1970Stalnaker ( , 1973Stalnaker ( , 1974 argues that all presuppositions are pragmatic, but he did not himself show how to reconcile this view with the fine-grained details of the projection problem or the apparently sub-sentential nature of some accommodation. However, Atlas (1976Atlas ( , 1977Atlas ( , 1979, Atlas & Levinson (1981), Boër & Lycan (1976), Kempson (1975), Wilson (1975), and others working in 'radical pragmatics' sought to do just this by deriving all presuppositions from a semantics involving only at-issue content, and a pragmatic theory of the sort described by Grice (1975) (discussed in Section 3).…”

Pursuing and demonstrating understanding in dialogue

“…Historically, linguists and philosophers have characterized state in conversation qualitatively in terms of a notion of mutual knowledge or common ground [Stalnaker, 1974, 1978, Clark and Marshall, 1981. This is a body of information that interlocutors know they can rely on in formulating utterances.…”