The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000).Keywords Presuppositions AE Attention AE Soft triggers AE Aboutness AE Lexical semantics of verbs AE Factivity IntroductionMost studies on presuppositions are concerned with the projection problem, i.e. the question of how presuppositions of complex statements can be predicted from the presuppositions of their parts. The question of why presuppositions arise to begin with is a more rarely discussed issue, with much of the field being agnostic about the problem. This paper aims to address this question in connection with so-called soft presuppositional triggers. M. Abrusán (&)Lichtenberg Kolleg, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany e-mail: abrusan@alum.mit.edu 123 Linguist and Philos (2011) 34:491-535 DOI 10.1007/s10988-012-9108-y R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers Márta AbrusánPublished online: 1 May 2012 Ó The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Besides the agnostic position, there are two main types of attitudes to the triggering problem. The first answer is that presuppositions are just an arbitrary special type of meaning specified by the lexicon, requiring their own set of rules for combining with other elements when embedded in larger contexts. According to the second view, suggested in passing by Stalnaker (1974) and also endorsed by Simons (2001), Abusch (2010), Schlenker (2010), presuppositions might arise via pragmatic means from assumptions about rules that rational interlocutors follow, just like conversational implicatures.Neither of the above approaches are satisfactory: the first approach is nonexplanatory and posits an enormous amount of complexity in the semantic system. The second approach is theoretically attractive, however it is fair to say that to this date no satisfactory mechanism has been given that can derive based on rational rules of conversation why certain aspects of the meaning (and not others) are t...

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Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, 'soft' and 'hard'. 'Soft' presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while 'hard' presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers (and the sentences that contain them) interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, and question-answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts.

This paper examines a little studied type of perspective shift that I call protagonist projection (PP), following Holton (1997). (Other names for what is arguably the same phenomenon include non-reflective conscioussness, represented perception, viewpoint shift, etc.) PP is a way of describing the mental state of a protagonist that conveys, to some extent, her perspective. Similarly to its better known cousin free indirect discourse (FID), the shift in perspective is achieved without an overt operator. Unlike FID, PP is not based on a presumed (possibly silent) speech-act of a protagonist. Rather, it gives a linguistic form to pre-verbal perceptual content, sensations, feelings or implicit beliefs. I propose to analyse PP in a bi-contextual framework, extending Eckardt's (2014) approach to FID. Under the resulting analysis, FID and PP are two instances of a more general category of perspective shift. * I am grateful to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for extremely useful comments that helped improve the proposal considerably. Thanks to Sofia Bimpikou, Stefan Hinterwimmer, Emar Maier, Anne Reboul and Andreas Stokke for detailed comments on earlier versions of the manuscript, and David Beaver, Kate Davidson, Regine Eckardt, Manfred Krifka for helpful discussion at various stages of the writing of this paper, as well as the audiences at SALT 28, The Workshop on Semantic Approaches to Fiction, Narrative and Literature in Groningen in 2018, and the University of Milan. The research reported here was supported by the ANR-17-EURE-0017FrontCog and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02PSL grants.1 I use italics to represent presumed perspective shift, unless marked otherwise.

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Definite descriptions with reference failure have been argued to give rise to different truth-value intuitions depending on the local linguistic context in which they appear. We conducted an experiment to investigate these alleged differences, thereby contributing new data to the debate. We have found that pragmatic strategies dependent on verification and topicalisation, suggested in the context of trivalent/partial theories, indeed play a role in people's subjective judgments. We discuss the consequences of these findings for all major approaches to definite descriptions (i.e. Russellian, Strawsonian, pragmatic). Finally, we offer a discussion of the relative contribution of verificational and topicality effects on truth values, reaching the conclusion that verification is primarily relevant and topicality is dependent on that. We thus support von Fintel's (2004) position on the primacy of verification, but not his dismissal of topicality as a factor.