Triggering verbal presuppositions

Abstract

This paper offers a predictive mechanism to derive the presuppositions of verbs. The starting point is the intuition, dating back at least to Stalnaker 1974, that the information conveyed by a sentence that is in some sense independent from its main point is presupposed. The contribution of this paper is to spell out a mechanism for deciding what will become the main point of the sentence and how to calculate independence. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. As a very rough approximation, the main point of an utterance is what (in a sense to be defined) has to be about the event time of the matrix predicate and the information that the sentence conveys but is not (or does not have to be) about the event time of the matrix predicate is presupposed. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on Demolombe & Fariñas del Cerro 2000.

Argumentation Profiles

“…In this type of commitments fall the classical "semantic" presuppositions triggered by various grammatical phenomena (such as factives, etc.) and the themefocus articulation of an utterance (Abrusán 2010(Abrusán , 2011Atlas 1991;Gazdar 1979;Kay 1992;Levinson 1983, chap. 4), but also the needed tacit assumptions (Ennis 1982) necessary for the reasonableness of the argument and some conventional implicatures (such as the ones triggered by "but" or "only") (Ducrot 1972(Ducrot , 1980.…”

“…In case the word meaning is commonly accepted, but it is used to refer to a state of affairs not accepted and presupposed as such (Abrusán 2010(Abrusán , 2011Atlas 1991;Gazdar 1979;Kay 1992;Levinson 1983), the case can be classified as a question begging epithet. Using a recent example, when Trump claimed "Why should I go to that cemetery [an American Cemetery in France with more than 1800 US marines buried]?…”

Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers

“…Stalnaker 1974;Karttunen and Peters 1979;Wilson and Sperber 1979;Soames 1989;Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 2000). Approximately the same idea has also been taken up-in various theoretical incarnations-in some more recent work as well (see Abbott 2000;Simons et al 2010;Abrusán 2011). This paper attempts to predict how presuppositions of soft triggers arise from general rules of attention, i.e.…”