Presupposition Triggering from Alternatives

Abstract

This paper considers a set of presupposition triggers including focus, questions, 'contrastive' statives, and an 'affirmation/negation' construction involving and not, where presuppositions are cancelable. It is proposed that these constructions, rather than having strict semantic presuppositions, have representations involving alternative sets in the sense of alternative semantics of questions and focus, and that a default process generates a presupposition from the alternative set. Presupposition projection facts are dealt with by stating a default constraint referring to dynamic denotations. The analysis can be extended to other constructions and lexical items with defeasible presupposition triggering behavior, such as inchoatives, by hypothesizing a representation involving alternatives.

A scalar implicature-based approach to neg-raising

“…The main motivation for this account as opposed to a presupposition-based approach (Bartsch 1973and Gajewski 2005 comes from the differences between presuppositions and neg-raising inferences, noticed by Gajewski (2005Gajewski ( , 2007 and Homer (2012). In response to this issue, Gajewski (2007) argues that neg-raising predicates are soft presuppositional triggers and adopts the account of how their presuppositions arise by Abusch (2002Abusch ( , 2010. However, I argue that there is a difference between soft triggers and neg-raising predicates in their behavior in embeddings; a difference that is straightforwardly accounted for in the present approach.…”

“…This approach, while successful in accounting for a variety of data relating to neg-raising, also faces the problem of explaining why the presupposition that it postulates does not behave like other presuppositions in embeddings other than negation. Gajewski (2007) tries to overcome this problem by connecting neg-raising predicates to "soft" presuppositional triggers, in the sense of Abusch (2002Abusch ( , 2010, a class of triggers whose presupposition is particularly weak and context-dependent. I argue that, nonetheless, the behavior of neg-raising predicates is different from that of this class of presuppositional triggers.…”

“…I argue that, nonetheless, the behavior of neg-raising predicates is different from that of this class of presuppositional triggers. Furthermore, as I discuss below, by adopting Abusch's (2010) account of soft triggers, Gajewski (2007) inherits some empirical issues and extra non-standard assumptions about the semantics-pragmatic interface associated with that view. 3 This paper was conceived primarily as a contribution to semantic/pragmatic take to the phenomenon of Neg Raising.…”

Triggering verbal presuppositions

“…Sperber & Wilson (1979), these two verbs are not actually synonymous. Another such pair was put forth by Abusch (2002Abusch ( , 2010. She has argued that the pairs be right-be aware are symmetric in the following way: A sentence such as John is right that dinner is ready asserts the truth of its complement and presupposes that John believes that dinner is ready, while the sentence John is aware that dinner is ready asserts that John believes that dinner is ready and presupposes its complement.…”

Incremental and predictive interpretation: Experimental evidence and possible accounts

“…The consistent negative interaction is promising, so we will try to elicit it with a hard presupposition trigger like again (Abusch 2010;Schwarz 2014 a.o. ), which might have a larger effect.…”