To appear in Topoi.

An information packaging approach topresuppositions and conventional implicatures

Barbara Abbottabbottb@msu.edu

2014

1. Introduction.

Within the relevant semantics and pragmatics literature the terms “presupposition” and “conventional implicature” are used in a variety of different, but frequently overlapping, ways. The overlaps are perhaps not surprising, given that the two categories of conveyed meaning share the property of remaining constant in the scope of other operators – the property Tonhauser et al. (2013) usefully characterize as PROJECTIVITY. One of my purposes in this paper will be to try to clarify these different usages. We do that in §2 below. In §3 we will look at a couple of other properties which are shared by some, but not all, of these projective contents – STRONG CONTEXTUAL FELICITY (Tonhauser et al. 2013), and NEUTRALIZABILITY (Abbott 2006). The idea is to try to explain all three properties by taking into account information packaging. This will be the subject of §4. The last section will conclude.

2. Terminological issues.

2.1. Historical review. The term “presupposition” came into linguistics from Frege (1892, 69; per Max Black 1952) and Strawson (1952, 175) as a term for a relation between sentences, or utterances of sentences, and propositions. The illustrative examples in (1) (from Frege (1892), and Strawson (1950), respectively) are well known.

(1) a. Kepler died in misery presupposes that the name Kepler has a referent.b. The king of France is wise presupposes that there is a king of France.

In these examples the expression giving rise to the presupposition, or its TRIGGER, is a definite noun phrase – a proper name in (1a) and a definite description in (1b).

The term “presupposition” was extended by Kiparsky & Kiparsky (1970) to include examples like those in (2).

(2) a. It is significant that he has been found guilty presupposes that he has been found guilty.

b. I regret that it is raining presupposes that it is raining.

1

The triggers in this case are predicates (like be significant that and regret) for which the Kiparskys coined the term FACTIVE, and the presupposed proposition is the one expressed by its complement. (Interestingly, the Kiparskys did not cite either Frege or Strawson in their paper, nor did Strawson cite Frege.)

Grice (1975) introduced the term “conventional implicature” for a relation that is similar in some ways to the presupposition relation occurring in the examples above. Grice’s example of a conventional implicature is given in (3).

(3) He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave conventionally implicates that his being brave is a consequence of his being English.

The presupposed propositions in (1) and (2) are also entailed1 by their presupposing sentences; if The king of France is wise is true, then there must be a king of France. However Grice specifically described conventional implicatures as able to be false while the implicating sentence is true – thus not part of “what is said”, in Grice’s favored sense. According to Grice the truth conditions for He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave are the same as they would be for the sentence without therefore, and thus quite independent of whatever therefore expresses. (As noted by Horn (2007), Frege (1892, 1918-19) also distinguished presuppositions (or Voraussetzungen) from conventional implicatures (which Horn 2007 termed Andeutungen, and Horn 2013 calls “F-implicatures”) along similar lines.) We can characterize these propositions as being DETACHABLE, using a term of Grice’s (e.g. 1989: 58) which means that one could make the same assertion without expressing the conventional implicature – typically by simply omitting the triggering expression.

Presuppositions and conventional implicatures have in common two distinctive properties: (i) they are propositions which are not the main asserted or at-issue content2,3 of an utterance and (ii) (as noted in the introduction) they are generally outside the scope of negation and other sentence operators – they are projective. That is, in the happy phrasing of Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet (1990: 24), they remain constant throughout “the S family”. For a plain, positive, indicative sentence S – what I like to call the MATRIARCH of the family – other members can be obtained by adding negation, questioning, modals, or embedding in the antecedent of a conditional. Thus if the matriarch S = The king of France is wise, the S family would include all the examples in (4) in addition to many others.

(4) a. The king of France is wise.b. The king of France is not wise.

1 Or necessitated. If presupposition failure results in lack of a truth value for the presupposing sentence (as believed by many people, in addition to Frege and Strawson), then the relation between that sentence and its presuppositions can’t be classical entailment, since modus tollens would no longer hold in this case. I will continue to use the terms “entail” and “entailment”, assuming this proviso.2 The useful term “at-issue”, in this sense, originated with Bill Ladusaw in classes he taught at UC Santa Cruz in the 1990’s. Its spread has been aided by some of his students (e.g. Chris Barker (e.g. 1999) and Chris Potts (e.g. 2005)).3 Larry Horn has reminded me that a number of scholars (e.g. Neale 1999, Predelli 2003) have argued that what is conveyed by therefore may indeed be at-issue in some cases, but I don’t know that I am convinced. I will continue to use therefore as one example of a conventional implicature, and hope that it does not affect any of my important claims in this paper.

2

c. Is the king of France wise?d. Possibly, the king of France is wise.e. If the king of France is wise, he will invest in Rogaine.

It can be seen that, in the unmarked case, all of these would convey an assumption that there is a king of France, and this holds true in general (though not always) when a presupposition trigger occurs embedded in a complex sentence.

As noted above, conventional implicatures are also projective (although sometimes finding the appropriate negations is complex). (5) gives some examples for Grice’s example of therefore.

(5) a. Is he an Englishman, and therefore brave?b. Possibly he is an Englishman, and therefore brave.c. If he is an Englishman, and therefore brave, he will have to stay

and fight.

All of these sentences convey the proposition that his being brave is a consequence of his being English.

This completes a review of the origins of our two terms. Now we turn to some terminological mayhem.

2.2. Terminological mayhem.Given the similarities between presuppositions and conventional implicatures, it is perhaps not surprising that the distinction between the two – the fact that presuppositions are entailed by their matriarch while conventional implicatures are not – has often been glossed over or ignored. Thus David Lewis characterized the example in (6)

(6) Even George Lakoff could win.

as requiring “the presupposition that George is not a leading candidate” (Lewis 1979,

339; boldface added), even though the proposition that George is not a leading candidate does not seem to be entailed by (6). Surely, if George Lakoff could win, we would consider (6) to be true, even if he were in fact a leading candidate.

Lewis was following Stalnaker 1973 here, who in turn was drawing on Horn 1969. Both of these papers appeared before the publication of Grice 1975, and the latter before Grice’s work was even available in typescript. Horn was taking the property of projectivity as the single criterion for presuppositionhood, as have many since. But even for a while after Grice’s work was commonly available, the main focus was on conversational implicatures; conventional implicatures were slower to reach the conscious attention of linguists and philosophers. Yet despite today’s now widespread acquaintance with Grice’s concept of conventional implicature, the tradition of using the term “presupposition” for them has continued in some quarters. Thus Gauker 2008, which purports to be an analysis of presuppositions, devotes considerable attention to the adverbial too, which, as we’ll see below, introduces a conventional implicature. (The term “conventional implicature” does not appear in Gauker’s paper.)

3

On the other hand Karttunen & Peters’ classic 1979 paper titled “Conventional implicature” was aimed, in part, at clarifying distinctions among the variety of phenomena which had been discussed under the heading “presupposition”. They pointed out in particular the propositions associated with particles like even, and too, as well as implicative verbs like manage. We have seen an example with even above in (6); compare the examples below.

(7) a. Mary left too.b. Sam managed to finish the novel.

(7a) alludes to the existence of a salient alternative – either that someone else left, or that Mary did something else. And (7b) conveys an assumption that there was some difficulty involved in the task. Karttunen & Peters argued (correctly in my opinion) that these should be considered to be conventional implicatures rather than presuppositions, and the semantics devised by Karttunen and Peters treated them as such.

However the authors also (unfortunately in my opinion) suggested that the propositions associated with definite descriptions (48), factive predicates, and the it-cleft and pseudocleft (or wh-cleft) constructions (11) would come under the same heading. We have seen an example of a definite description (Strawson’s classic given above in (1b)), as well as 2 factive predicates (the examples from Kiparsky & Kiparsky above in (2)). (8) below gives examples of the two kinds of cleft constructions which Karttunen & Peters alluded to; (8a) is an it-cleft and (8b) is a wh-cleft.

(8) a. It was the foreign language teacher who told the students about China.

b. What the foreign language teacher told the students about was China.

Now Karttunen & Peters did not specify which propositions they had in mind as being associated with these four constructions. However it would be natural to assume that they meant the standard ones. For definite descriptions this would be the existence of a referent,4 and for factive verbs, it would be the proposition expressed by the complement clause. It-clefts and wh-clefts are standardly assumed to presuppose the existential closure of the open proposition expressed by the backgrounded clause; for (8a) this would be that somebody told the students about China, and for (8b) this would be that the foreign language teacher told the students about something.

If indeed these were the propositions that Karttunen & Peters had in mind, then their suggestion that they should be classified as conventional implicatures is quite problematic, since these propositions are definitely entailed by the matriarchal S. As we have seen, Grice specifically characterized conventional implicatures as not being part of the truth conditions of the (main) assertion – as being instead detachable. (Curiously, Karttunen and Peters cite this very characteristic in note 3 of their paper, which reviews Grice’s work.)4 There is another proposition associated with definite descriptions, and that is that their descriptive content applies uniquely to an entity in the relevant universe of discourse. Horn & Abbott 2012 argue that this proposition is not entailed, and is thus a conventional implicature rather than a presupposition. We will return to the uniqueness implicature briefly below.

4

I’ll just mention a couple of additional contributions to terminological confusion. One is Potts’ 2005 book “The logic of conventional implicatures”. Potts narrowed Grice’s definition in such a way as to rule out what is conveyed by expressions like therefore, and even. His main focus was on two subcategories. First, supplemental expressions, e.g. parentheticals, as in (9) below

(9) Ames was, as the press reported, a successful spy. [= Potts 2005, ex. 2.13a; underlining in original]

as well as speaker oriented adverbials like unfortunately and frankly. And second, what he referred to as “expressives” – a category which would include honorifics, such as tu/vous in French, and epithets, as in (10),

(10) That damn bridge is down again.

which convey the speaker’s attitude toward someone or something.Meanwhile Bach, in “The myth of conventional implicature” (1999) had taken the

more extreme step of attempting to dismiss the concept of conventional implicature altogether. Contrary to Grice, he categorized expressions like even and too as indeed forming part of what is said. However his conception of what is said is somewhat different from Grice’s, in that it includes propositions expressed which are not part of the main at-issue content. (One of Bach’s very useful contributions in this paper was to stress the fact that our utterances typically express a number of distinct propositions – not just one.) Adverbials like frankly Bach characterized as utterance modifiers. In reply to Bach it might be said that, while he has usefully subcategorized some of Grice’s conventional implicatures, he hasn’t really gotten rid of detachable propositions conveyed by an utterance which are not part of its main at-issue content – i.e. conventional implicatures as originally understood.

2.3 Two categories.If we stick to the original distinguishing feature of nondetachability from the matriarch for presuppositions, and detachability for conventional implicatures, then we would sort a variety of projective contents under the two headings as shown in the two tables below.5

Table 1. Some presuppositions and their triggersTRIGGER PRESUPPOSITIONDefinite descriptions Existence of referentPronouns Existence of referentFactive predicates Content of complement Change of state verbs Prior conditionVarious lexical items (e.g. bachelor, win) Backgrounded components (e.g. ADULT,

HUMAN, MALE; COMPETE)Cleft constructions, other focusing constructions

Existential closure of open proposition expressed by sentence minus focus

Manner adverbials (e.g. slowly, with a Whatever is expressed by the rest of the

5 These tables are revised versions of Tables 1 and 2 in Abbott 2006.

5

knife) sentence

Table 2. Some conventional implicatures and their triggersTRIGGER CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATUREConnectives (e.g. therefore, but) Various (e.g. cause, contrast)Definite descriptions UniquenessImplicative verbs (e.g. manage, forget to) Various (e.g. effort, intention)Iteratives (e.g. still, again, too) Salient alternativeHonorifics (e.g. tu/vous) Social status of referentExpletives (e.g. that bastard) Speaker’s opinion of referentParenthetical clauses Content of clauseOther (e.g. even) Various (e.g. unexpectedness)

3. Some additional characteristics.

Although they share the important property of projectivity, it seems clear that presuppositions and conventional implicatures are two collections of diverse groups of expressions. Let us take a look at two other characteristics which distinguish members of these groups.

3.1. Strong contextual felicity. The title of this subsection is a useful term from Tonhauser et al. 2013. It refers a characteristic shared by some, but not all, projective contents – the imposition of a requirement on the context for felicity.6 The much discussed requirement of a salient alternative which is associated with too is one example. Example (11) below is modified from Tonhauser et al.’s ex. 17:

(11) [Context: Malena is eating her lunch, a hamburger, on the bus going into town. A woman who she doesn’t know sits down next to her and says:]

# Our bus driver is eating empanadas, too.

As Tonhauser et al. note, if the context for this utterance is altered so that Malena is eating empanadas instead of a hamburger, the utterance becomes acceptable.

Many authors have observed that presuppositions may convey new information (cf. e.g. Karttunen 1974; Hawkins 1978; Fraurud 1990; Birner & Ward 1994, 1998; Delin & Oberlander 1995; Oberlander & Delin 1996; Poesio & Vieira 1998; Abbott 2000, 2008a, 2008b; Gauker 2008). Interestingly, Tonhauser et al. confirm that conclusion, finding that of the constructions they investigated, most presuppositions did not share the property of strong contextual felicity (67).7 And they found similar results for conventional implicatures; thus too (and the other iterative expressions) seem to be

6 Tonhauser et al. investigated another property which they termed “obligatory local effect”, having to do with the preservation of projective content under the scope of other operators. We will not be concerned with that property here.

6

exceptional. Let us look more closely at the situation. We will start with presuppositions, and then turn to conventional implicatures.

3.1.1. Presuppositions. As noted above, in many cases presuppositions lack the property of strong contextual felicity. Abbott 2000 gave examples of definite descriptions, factive sentences, it-clefts and reverse wh-clefts which were able to convey new information felicitously. One of each of these is repeated below in (12), with underlining added in each case to highlight the expression of the presupposed content.

(12) a. In her talk, Baldwin introduced the notion that syntactic structure is derivable from pragmatic principles. [= Birner & Ward 1994, ex. 1a]b. We regret that children cannot accompany their parents to commencement exercises. [= Karttunen 1974, ex. 26a, italics in original]c. The leaders of the militant homophile movement in America generally have been young people. IT WAS THEY WHO FOUGHT BACK DURING A VIOLENT POLICE RAID ON A GREENWICH VILLAGE BAR IN 1969, AN INCIDENT FROM WHICH MANY GAYS DATE THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN CRUSADE FOR HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS . (PG, p. 16) [= Prince 1978, ex. 41b, small caps in original; PG = Pennsylvania Gazette]d. …and this is where they said right let it all go for fellowships, studentships, and research posts [= Oberlander & Delin 1998, ex. 31a, italics in original]

Others have observed that it is possible to use change-of-state verbs in contexts where the prior condition was not common knowledge. The following example is taken from Tonhauser et al. 2013, ex. 20b (underlining added).

(13) [Context: Laura, who doesn’t live with her parents, visits them and asks them to sit down with her because she has to tell them something:]

I’ve stopped doing drugs.

As Tonhauser et al. note, this utterance is felicitous without an assumption that the parents had prior knowledge of their daughter’s drug use. Similarly manner adverbials may be used in sentences, the rest of whose content is not part of the common ground; cf. e.g. (14) (I’ve underlined the presupposed material here – the trigger is slowly).

(14) Mary turned around slowly, and stared intensely at the stranger.

And finally presuppositional lexical items can be used in this way, as in (15).

(15) Guess what – Sue just won a shooting contest!

7 The ordinary, every day senses of the word “presuppose” are (according to my American Heritage dictionary): “1. To believe or suppose in advance. 2. To require or involve necessarily as an antecedent.” I can’t help but feel that the use of the terms “presuppose” and “presupposition” has encouraged the widespread but obviously false belief that, in order for an utterance to be felicitous, its presuppositions must belong to the common ground. We shall see that this is true for only some cases – definitely not all.

7

(15) would be felicitous in a context where the speaker does not assume that their addressee knows that Sue had competed in the contest. So it is clear that not all presuppositions need be part of the common ground for felicitous utterance — i.e. they do not possess the property of strong contextual felicity.

Of course presuppositions can indeed be part of the common ground, and may in fact be in many cases. It is an interesting empirical question what the proportion is, in naturally occurring spoken and written texts. I only know of only one study to address this kind of question, and only for one of our subcategories of presupposition triggers. Poesio & Vieira (1998) investigated the use of definite descriptions in English. They gave their subjects texts, and asked them to classify the definite descriptions as anaphoric (that is with antecedents in the same text), bridging (where the referent would be inferable from the prior text), familiar from the larger situation or general knowledge, or unfamiliar. Although there was some disagreement in coding by the subjects, they did classify roughly 20-25% of the definite descriptions as unfamiliar – that is, as conveying new information.

Are there cases where presuppositions must belong to the common ground – i.e. which exhibit strong contextual felicity? One might wonder whether it-clefts and/or wh-clefts have this property; because their syntactic structures are noncanonical, one might expect them to impose some constraint on the prior context. (We will return to this kind of factor below.) Prince (1978) investigated exactly this issue, and summarized her findings as follows:

WH-clefts and it-clefts have long been claimed to be interchangeable. However, an examination of naturally-occurring discourse demonstrates that this claim is incorrect. The presupposed part (WH-clause) of a WH-cleft represents information that the speaker can assume the hearer is thinking about. In one variety of it-cleft, the presupposed part (that/WH-clause) represents information which the speaker assumes the hearer knows or can deduce, but is not presumably thinking about. In another variety of it-cleft, the presupposed part represents information which the speaker takes to be a known fact, though definitely NOT known to the hearer. (Prince 1978: 883)

The example given above in (12c) is of the last type referred to in this quote, a type which Prince described as “informative presupposition it-clefts” (898).

The generally weaker contextual requirements of it-clefts, as compared with wh-clefts, correlates with the fact that in a (normal) wh-cleft, the presupposed portion is moved forward in the sentence while in an it-cleft, it is moved toward the end. It is well known that, in the unmarked case, older information occurs earlier in a sentence and newer information later (cf. Birner & Ward 1998). Similarly reverse wh-clefts (which Prince did not discuss), which postpose the presupposed portion, can convey new information in that portion – cf. example (12d) above.

Another example of presupposed content which imposes strong contextual felicity would be that associated with pronouns. Since pronouns provide so little by way of information about their intended referent, they are usually only felicitous when they have a either salient antecedent, or a suitable salient referent in the extralinguistic context.

8

Finally, Abbott & Horn (2011) discuss some examples of definite descriptions which do seem to require prior knowledge on the part of the addressee for acceptability (unlike example (12a) above). One striking, almost naturally occurring, example came from Sue Grafton’s “U is for undertow”. The context is a phone conversation between a newly introduced character, Walker McNally, and a person named Jon whom Walker has just called and whom the reader has not met previously. Walker is describing a police search in his neighborhood.

(16) “I saw them just now, on my way home from work. I pulled over and chatted with a gal I knew. She said they thought a child was buried on the hill. They dug up the dog.” [= Abbott & Horn 2011, ex. 19; from Grafton 2010: 91]

Use of the definite description the dog here instantly tells the reader that Walker knowsthat Jon is familiar with the dog in question.

3.1.2. Conventional implicatures. When we turn to conventional implicatures we find, as noted above, that aside from iteratives like too, most of the rest of the categories of conventional implicature seem not to impose any requirement. (17) below repeats the examples we have seen of expressions which convey conventional implicatures.

(17) a. He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave.b. Even George Lakoff could win.c. Sam managed to finish the novel.d. Ames was, as the press reported, a successful spy.e. The damn bridge is down again.

It seems that for each of these examples, the proposition conveyed by the underlined portion need not be a part of the common ground in order for the utterance to be felicitous.

Footnote 5 above pointed out that in addition to the presupposition of existence of a referent, definite descriptions contribute a conventional implicature of uniqueness. As with most of the other examples of conventional implicatures, this one does not share the requirement of strong contextual felicity. So consider (18) below:

(18) The author of a new book on leeches was signing copies downtown today.

Clearly (18) does not require an assumption on the part of the speaker that the addressee knows that this new book had only one author.

There remains just one subcategory – that of honorific expressions, like tu and vous in French, or du and Sie in German. (Apparently Japanese has a somewhat greater collection of these expressions.) I have to say that, not being a native speaker of a language with this kind of expression, I don’t know whether they possess the characteristic of strong contextual felicity.

9

3.1.3. Summary. So to summarize this subsection, we have seen that presuppositions are split between those that impose the requirement of strong contextual felicity (triggered by some clefts, pronouns, and some definite descriptions) and those that don’t (triggered by some definite descriptions, factives, change of state verbs, various lexical items, some clefts, and manner adverbials). Similarly conventional implicatures, other than the iteratives (again, too, etc.) and possibly the honorifics, do not impose it. These results are summarized in Tables 3 and 4 below, where the third column in each case indicates whether or not that trigger imposes strong contextual felicity.

Table 3. +/– Strong contextual felicity for presuppositions.TRIGGER PRESUPPOSITION SCFDefinite descriptions Existence of referent +/–Pronouns Existence of referent +Factive predicates Content of complement –Change of state verbs Prior condition –Various lexical items (e.g. bachelor, win)

Backgrounded components (e.g. ADULT, HUMAN, MALE; COMPETE)

–

Cleft constructions, other focusing constructions

Existential closure of open proposition expressed by sentence minus focus

+/–

Manner adverbials (e.g. slowly, with a knife)

Whatever is expressed by the rest of the sentence

–

Table 4. +/–Strong contextual felicity for conventional implicatures.TRIGGER CONVENTIONAL

IMPLICATURESCF

Connectives (e.g. therefore, but) Various (e.g. cause, contrast) –Definite descriptions Uniqueness –Implicative verbs (e.g. manage, forget to) Various (e.g. effort, intention) –Iteratives (e.g. still, again, too) Salient alternative +Honorifics (e.g. tu/vous) Social status of referent ?Expletives (e.g. that bastard) Speaker’s opinion of referent –Parenthetical clauses Content of clause –Other (e.g. even) Various (e.g. unexpectedness) –

3.2. Neutralizability. The other characteristic I would like to look at is, in some ways, the opposite of the one just reviewed. It has been known for some time that certain kinds of presuppositions may, in some cases, disappear. This, of course, can only occur in sentences other than the matriarch of the S family; since presuppositions are entailed by their matriarch, they are nondetachable from her. However, things are different in the rest of the S family, where their nondetachability varies.

Abusch (2002) coined the term SOFT TRIGGER for the triggers of presuppositions which are neutralizable. One category of soft triggers consists of COGNITIVE FACTIVES, such as know, be aware, and discover. Beaver (2010) gives the following examples (all naturally occurring and discovered with the aid of Google). Here the triggers are

10

underlined – the interestingly non-presupposed portion is that expressed by their complements.

(19) a. …if anyone discovers that he method is also wombat-proof, I’d really like to know! [= Beaver 2010, ex. 32]

b. Mrs. London is not aware that there have ever been signs erected to stop use of the route. [= Beaver 2010, ex. 43]

c. Perhaps God knows that we will never reach the stars… [= Beaver 2010, ex. 51]

Clearly none of these convey that the propositions expressed in the complement clauses are true. Change of state verbs form another subcategory of soft triggers:

(20) I notice that you keep chewing on your pencil. Have you recently stopped smoking? [= Simons 2001, ex. 1; attributed to Geurts 1995]

(20) is perfectly felicitous in a context where the speaker does not know whether or not the addressee ever smoked. And finally presuppositional lexical items are also soft triggers, as shown in (21).

(21) Don’t worry about being in debt – you might win the lottery!

(21) would be fine in a context where it is an open question whether or not the addressee will ever buy a lottery ticket.

On the other hand the cleft constructions, manner adverbials, definite descriptions, and “strong” factive predicates (e.g. regret, be odd that) seem to be hard triggers, as illustrated below. (The first three examples here are taken from Abbott 2006, exx. 28b, 29a, and 32, respectively.)

(22) a. # I have no idea whether the problem has been solved, but possibly it was Sue who solved it.

b. # Possibly Mary didn’t slice the carrots, but did she do so carefully?c. # Possibly no one owns this book, but if I find the owner I will return it.d. # It’s an open question whether Bill cheated on the exam, but if he regrets

doing so I’m sure he’ll confess.

So presupposition triggers seem to be split between soft and hard varieties.When we turn to conventional implicatures, their triggers all seem to be of the hard

type, as illustrated below.

(23) a. #I don’t know if Jane ever rented “Manhattan” before, but perhaps she’s renting it again. [= Simons 2001, ex. 6]

b. # I don’t know whether English people are generally brave, but possibly Marcia is English, and therefore brave. [= Abbott 2006, ex. 26a]

c. # Shaquille O’Neal, who is very tall, advertises small cars; but maybe he isn’t very tall.

11

d. # I don’t know whether that book has more than one author, but maybe the author will be at the bookstore to tell us.

By way of summary for this section, let us add this characteristic to our previous tables.

Table 5. Neutralizability for presuppositions.TRIGGER PRESUPPOSITION SCF NDefinite descriptions Existence of referent +/– –Pronouns Existence of referent + –Factive predicates Content of complement – +/–Change of state verbs Prior condition – +Various lexical items (e.g. bachelor, win)

Backgrounded components (e.g. ADULT, HUMAN, MALE; COMPETE)

– +

Cleft constructions, other focusing constructions

Existential closure of open proposition expressed by sentence minus focus

+/– –

Manner adverbials (e.g. slowly, with a knife)

Whatever is expressed by the rest of the sentence

– –

Table 6. Neutralizability for conventional implicatures.TRIGGER CONVENTIONAL

IMPLICATURESCF N

Connectives (e.g. therefore, but) Various (e.g. cause, contrast) – –Definite descriptions Uniqueness – –Implicative verbs (e.g. manage, forget to) Various (e.g. effort, intention) – –Iteratives (e.g. still, again, too) Salient alternative + –Honorifics (e.g. tu/vous) Social status of referent ? –Expletives (e.g. that bastard) Speaker’s opinion of referent – –Parenthetical clauses Content of clause – –Other (e.g. even) Various (e.g. unexpectedness) – –

4. The information packaging approach.

We come now, finally, to our main focus, which is finding explanations for the properties we have noted which are associated with presuppositions and conventional implicatures – projectivity, strong contextual felicity, and neutralizability. I should warn you now that the results of our searches in these areas will not be completely successful.

4.1. Projectivity.In my 2000 paper “Presuppositions as nonassertions” I put forward an approach to finding an explanation for what I there called “grammatical presuppositions” (to make clear their distinction from propositions which simply belong to the common ground):

I propose that grammatical presuppositions are a consequence of a natural limit on what can be asserted in any given utterance, where what is

12

asserted is what is presented as the main point of the utterance, what the speaker is going on record as contributing to the discourse. (Abbott 2000: 1431)

What I termed “the main point of the utterance” I take to be to be the same as the concept of “at-issue” content.

The idea that, in the typical case, there is just one proposition functioning in that role has been advanced many times. Thus Stalnaker, in putting forward an explanation for the factivity of know, depended crucially on that assumption.

Suppose a speaker were to assert that x knows that P in a context where the truth of P is in doubt or dispute. He would be saying in one breath something that could be challenged in two different ways. He would be leaving unclear whether his main point was to make a claim about the truth of P, or to make a claim about the epistemic situation of x (the knower) and thus leaving unclear what direction he tended or expected the conversation to take. (Stalnaker 1974: 476)

Similarly Grice (1981), noting that assertions should be framed in a way suitable for natural responses to the utterance and that denial is one such natural response, remarked:

If your assertions are complex and conjunctive, and you are asserting a number of things at the same time, then it would be natural, on the assumption that any one of them might be challengeable, to set them out separately and so make it easy for anyone who wanted to challenge them to do so. (Grice 1981: 189)

So, in general, assertions need to be separated out, one per utterance.8

Grammar seems to comply with this idea, in requiring there to be just one main predicate in any (non-compound) sentence. Furthermore that predicate is the one which is negated, questioned, modalized, or suspended in an if clause. Thus we seem to have an explanation for the property of projectivity.

4.1.1. Some advantages. As Grice remarks in the passage just quoted, it is natural to anticipate a possible challenge to your assertions, and to frame your utterances appropriately. The flip side of that would be that propositions which are not put forward as the main assertion should be ones that you don’t expect to be challenged on, propositions that are not controversial; and propositions that are part of the common ground belong to this category. So, as I noted in my 2000 paper, one advantage to this approach is that it offers an explanation for why presuppositions may often be part of the common ground.

Simons et al. (2010) point out an additional advantage to this approach; it is well known that stress patterns can alter what the at-issue content of an utterance is. Applying focal stress to a constituent has much the same effect as the cleft constructions – making

8 There are, of course, complications for this claim. Conjunctions and disjunctions present two of them. See Abbott 2000, n. 7, pp. 1431f, for discussion.

13

what is focused stand out as the main point of the utterance and backgrounding the remaining material. So, compare example (8a) above, repeated here as (24a), with (24b), where the subject constituent is intonationally prominent (“[…]F” indicates focal stress).

(24) a. It was the foreign language teacher who told the students about China.

b. [The foreign language teacher]F told the students about China.

In both cases what projects is what is expressed by the remainder of the sentence – the presupposition that someone told the students about China.

4.1.2. Conventional implicatures. There are complications to this picture, of course. But before we get to them, let us turn to the question of whether conventional implicatures might be given the same accounting as presuppositions. The analysis of Simons et al. 2010 does exactly that – it unifies the analysis of presuppositions and conventional implicatures under the common heading of content that projects. The core of this analysis is the hypothesis that “material projects if and only if it is not-at-issue” (319),9 where being at-issue is in turn analyzed in connection with the notion of the “question under discussion” or QUD, of Roberts 1996.10 Since both presuppositions and conventional implicatures are not part of the at-issue content, then both are predicted to project, and as we have seen, that is the case.

4.1.3. Some complications. Now we must turn to some complications. It would seem that there are cases where embedded propositions do not project. One kind of case would be the complements of non-factive propositional attitude predicates such as hope, believe, be afraid, etc. So, none of the examples below convey the proposition that there will be a pop quiz on Monday.

(25) a. The students weren’t worried that there would be a pop quiz Monday.

b. Were the students worried that there would be a pop quiz Monday?c. Possibly the students were worried that there would be a pop quiz

Monday.d. If the students were worried that there would be a pop quiz Monday, they didn’t show it.

Of course the matriarch of this family, below in (26), doesn’t convey that either.

(26) The students were worried that there would be a pop quiz Monday.

Simons et al. (2010) sometimes frame their core hypothesis using the word “implication”, as in the statement below, and this seems to be crucial.9 Some comments in Simons et al. 2013 suggest that this view is being revised, by at least some of the authors. Cf. note 9, p. 9. See also Simons et al. 2014.10 Perhaps this is a good place to make clear that I have reservations about the QUD approach to discourse, and specifically, any requirement that there always be a QUD. Discourse initial utterances, for example, seem to present a problem for such a requirement.

14

(27) “All and only those implications of (embedded) sentences which are not-at-issue relative to the Question Under Discussion in the context have the potential to project.” [= Simons et al. 2010, 12a; boldface added]

Since the proposition that there will be a pop quiz Monday is not implied by these sentences, on this statement of the claim we would not expect them to project. And indeed, if the speaker isn’t even implying that the proposition is true, how could it project?

Let’s consider another case:

(28) Ted remembered to shut the door.

Unlike the preceding kind of case, an utterance of (28) would naturally convey that Ted had, in fact, shut the door. Yet this proposition does not project either, as is clear from the following.

(29) a. Ted didn’t remember to shut the door.b. Did Ted remember to shut the door?c. Possibly Ted remembered to shut the door.d. If Ted remembered to shut the door, then everything’s fine.

None of these examples conveys that Ted shut the door.Let us look again at Simons et al.’s hypothesis as stated above in (27). It makes

reference to implications “not-at-issue relative to the Question Under Discussion [the QUD]…”. Later, the concept of being at-issue relative to the QUD is defined in terms of contextually entailing a partial or complete answer to it (Simons et al. 2010: 316f.). Now, it may be a bit unclear what the QUD would be in the case of (28), but a natural assumption is that in many cases it would be whether or not Ted remembered to shut the door. The proposition that Ted did shut the door provides an answer to this question, and is thus at-issue and so not projective.

Let us consider another case, as sketched in (30).

(30) A: John’s looking gloomy and shaking his head – what’s he so sorry about?B: Well, he’s not sorry about punching the umpire, but he is sorry that his son’s

team lost.

Here it would seem that the propositions that John punched the umpire and that his son’s team lost are both at-issue relative to the QUD, and yet both project, contrary to the hypothesis.

Simons et al. (2010) also recognize some difficult cases for their analysis. One is given in (31) below (their ex. 25).

(31) A: Why aren’t you inviting any boys from your class to the party?B: I don’t like the boys in my class.

15

Since the existence of boys in B’s class is relevant to the QUD (because if there weren’t any, that would explain why B isn’t inviting any), it would seem that they should predict that the existence of boys would not project, but clearly it does.

By way of solution to this problem, Simons et al. suggest that “at least some constructions or lexical items conventionally mark their content as not-at-issue” (Simons et al. 2010: 322), although they did not specify which constructions or lexical items these might be. They then revised their predictions to include the following: “if some proposition is linguistically marked as not-at-issue, then, as long as the resulting interpretation is felicitous in other respects, the addressee will take it that the speaker does not intend to address the QUD via that proposition” (Simons et al. 2010: 323). This may work for the example in (31) above, but it does not seem to help for our example (30). Instead, in that example it seems that the speaker does intend to address the QUD with the propositions expressed by the complements of sorry, and that the addressee will understand that. Thus they should be at-issue, and hence not projective, but that is not the case.

Unfortunately I will have to leave this matter in this unresolved state.

4.2. Strong contextual felicity. We noted above in §3 that there are several cases of presuppositions, and one kind of conventional implicature, which impose restrictions on their contexts. Let us look first at the presuppositions, and then at the conventional implicature.

4.2.1. Presuppositions. Among presuppositions, it was the pronouns, some cases of cleft constructions, and some cases of definite descriptions which exhibited the property of strong contextual felicity. For pronouns, an explanation has already been suggested – because they contain so little information about their intended referent (in English, just number, and gender for singulars), the context, either linguistic or extra-linguistic, must supply some salient and unambiguous referent for felicity.

The cleft constructions are a little more complicated. Prince (1978) found that wh-clefts whose presupposed portion is preposed in the sentence (with the clefted constituent following), required the addressee not just to be aware of that information but for it actually be their consciousness for felicity. As noted above, this fact correlates with a general tendency to put old information first. But an explanation for the strong contextual felicity must lie in the fact that the speaker has gone out of their way to frame their utterance in this way.

When we come to it-clefts, the situation is very complicated. There are, as Prince noted, two different kinds. For ordinary it-clefts, such as (32)

(32) It wasn’t Molly who discovered the error.

Felicity requires that the addressee be familiar with, or able to deduce, the fact that somebody discovered the error. But Prince’s informative presupposition it-clefts, as in (12c) above, repeated here as (33), require another story.

(33) The leaders of the militant homophile movement in American generally have been young people. IT WAS THEY WHO FOUGHT BACK

16

DURING A VIOLENT POLICE RAID ON A GREENWICH VILLAGE BAR IN 1969, AN INCIDENT FROM WHICH MANY GAYS DATE THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN CRUSADE FOR HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS . (PG, p. 16) [= Prince 1978, ex. 41b, small caps in original; PG = Pennsylvania Gazette]

Prince, noting that this construction occurs in written (rather than spoken) texts, and most frequently newspapers or other kinds of informative texts, suggested that the use of the construction answered to two requirements – to present the information both as generally known (and thus not the responsibility of the author) but also as new to the addressee. As Prince put it, “they seem to say: ‘Don’t argue with me-I didn’t invent this-and I’m aware that I didn't invent this’” (Prince 1978: 900). The cleft-embedded status of the projective proposition addresses the requirement of presenting the information as generally known, while placing this material sentence-finally addresses the requirement imposed by the assumed novelty of the information to the addressee.

Finally, the issue of definite descriptions is even more complicated (at least it seems so to me). Abbott & Horn (2011) addressed the issue of the strong contextual felicity of some definite descriptions, as in example (16) above, repeated here as (34).

(34) “I saw them just now, on my way home from work. I pulled over and chatted with a gal I knew. She said they thought a child was buried on the hill. They dug up the dog.” [= Abbott & Horn 2011, ex. 19; from Grafton 2010: 91]

Our explanation rested on several factors. One is that the pair <a(n), the> form what is called a “Horn scale” – a series of expressions ranked in terms of increasing expressiveness. In general, use of a weaker expression conveys (by conversational implicature) that the extra meaning associated with the stronger expression does not hold. In the scale <a(n), the>, since the definite article, but not the indefinite, conveys uniqueness, use of the indefinite article will ordinarily convey nonuniqueness.

However, as Hawkins (1991) has observed, some occurrences of the indefinite article are in contexts which are neutral with respect to uniqueness. Consider (35) below.

(35) A movie that Mary was watching last night was really interesting. [= Hawkins 1991, ex. 16]

As Hawkins noted, (35) is neutral with respect to the question of whether Mary watched only one movie or more than one last night. Notice that (36), with the replacing a, conveys an assumption that the addressee knows about the movie in question.

(36) The movie that Mary was watching last night was really interesting. [= Abbott & Horn 2011, ex. 18]

Our conclusion, then, was as follows:

We would like to suggest that the occurrences of definite descriptions which implicate addressee familiarity are those which could have been

17

replaced with the corresponding indefinite description with no implication that there is more than one such entity – that is, where the corresponding indefinite description is UNIQUENESS-NEUTRAL. In such a context, to flag an entity as uniquely identifiable instructs the addressee to search for a relevant shared domain within which this entity is unique. (Abbott & Horn 2011: 6)

(See Abbott & Horn 2011 for more on this line of explanation.) Notice that the definite article in (34) above also occurs in a uniqueness-neutral context, hence the expected implication of familiarity (i.e. strong contextual felicity) associated with the in this example.

4.2.2. Conventional implicatures. We have observed that, of the conventional implicature triggers, it is only the iteratives (too, again, etc.) which make a strong background requirement. In this case it seems that the explanation for this property should be obvious – why would a speaker add an allusion to prior occurrences which are not salient in the context? To do so would seem quite uncooperative.11

4.3. Neutralizability.We come finally to the third of our characteristics – neutralizability. I have already addressed this issue (in Abbott 2006), so here I will just summarize the results of that paper. The main hypothesis (following up on a suggestion of Ladusaw’s12) was that neutralizability should correlate with nondetachability, the idea being that if there was an easy way to restate your main point without the associated proposition (presupposition or conventional implicature), then the fact that you didn’t choose to do that means that you intended to convey that additional proposition. On the other hand if there is no such easy way, then you should be allowed to neutralize it.

This hypothesis works in a number of cases. As we have noted, all conventional implicatures are detachable. The prediction would be that they should not be neutralizable, and as we have seen, that is the case.

When we turn to presuppositions the situation is more complicated. We will leave aside factive verbs for a moment (because that’s where the problem lies) and look first at the other cases. We saw that the presupposition about prior state associated with change of state verbs tends to be neutralizable. And it is also true that this proposition is nondetachable – any predicate expressing cessation, for instance, will carry along a presupposition about the prior state. Similarly for lexical items like win – any word or phrase expressing that event will have a presupposition about competition.

Turning to the hard triggers we have definite descriptions, cleft constructions, and manner adverbials. And in all three cases, the presuppositions are detachable, as expected. For definite descriptions, the presupposition of existence can be gotten rid of by using the indefinite article instead; one can always replace a cleft construction with the non-clefted version; and manner adverbials may simply be dropped.

But now we must face the fact that factive verbs do not fall in line with our hypothesis. The soft triggers are the minimal cognitive factives like be aware, discover,

11 I have to confess that at times, this explanation seems too hand-wavy to me. 12 See also some related ideas in Horn 1981, Abusch 2002, and Simons 2003.

18

and know – so if our hypothesis were true, their associated presuppositional content should be nondetachable. However the opposite is the case – the pairs in (37) and (38) below are very similar,13 differing only in that the (b) examples lack factivity. (These are taken from Abbott 2006, exx. 41-42.)

(37) a. Bill knows that it is raining.b. Bill is confident/certain/sure that it is raining.

(38) a. Mary is aware that she cannot trust you.b. Mary thinks/believes that she cannot trust you.

Thus the presupposition of truth of the complement clause is indeed detachable. On the other hand when we turn to the hard triggers, like regret, forget, and be odd that, we find the flip side of this unfortunate coin. The presupposition is nondetachable, as illustrated by the pairs below, but also not neutralizable (as we saw above).

(39) a. Sam regrets that he didn’t tell the truth.b. Sam is sorry/sad that he didn’t tell the truth.

(40) a. It is odd that penguins cannot fly.b. It is strange/surprising that penguins cannot fly.

It seems that any predicate expressing a meaning like regretting or being odd will be factive.

5. Conclusion.

In this paper I have tried to do several things; first, I’ve tried to clarify some existing terminological confusion regarding “presupposition” and “conventional implicature”, noting that they share the property of projectivity, but differ in detachability from the matriarch. Second, we reviewed a couple of other characteristics which to some extent cross-cut these categories – strong contextual felicity and neutralizability. And then finally I attempted to find explanations for these properties by looking at information packaging. Unfortunately I cannot claim complete success in this latter effort, but hopefully somebody else will be able to.

6. Acknowledgements.

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Philosophy Department, at the University of Texas, Austin, and I would like to thank that audience for their helpful comments. Larry Horn also read an earlier version, and gave me some very useful comments. This paper draws heavily on prior papers of mine, each of which acknowledges the many comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc. from other people which

13 Larry Horn (p.c.) has objected to my claim that these pairs are very similar. Once again, I’m not sure that I’m convinced.

19

have improved its content. Probably I should repeat all those acknowledgements here, but I’m not going to.

References

Abbott B (2000) Presuppositions as nonassertions. J Pragmatics 32:1419-1437

Abbott B (2006) Where have some of the presuppositions gone? In: Birner BW, Ward G (eds) Drawing the boundaries of meaning: Neo-Gricean studies in pragmatics and semantics in honor of Laurence R. Horn. John Benjamins, Philadelphia

Abbott B (2008a) Issues in the semantics and pragmatics of definite descriptions in English. In: Gundel JK, Hedberg N (eds) Reference: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Abbott B (2008b) Presuppositions and common ground. Linguist Philos 31:523-538

Abbott B, Horn LR (2011) Nonfamiliarity and indefinite descriptions. Paper presented at the annual LSA meeting, Pittsburgh, January 2011. Available on line at https://www.msu.edu/~abbottb/Nonfam&Indef.pdf

Abusch D (2002) Lexical alternatives as a source of pragmatic presuppositions. SALT 12:1-19

Bach K (1999) The myth of conventional implicature. Linguist Philos 22: 327-366

Beaver D (2010) Have you noticed that your Belly Button Lint colour is related to the colour of your clothing? In: Bäuerle R, Reyle U, Zimmerman TE (eds) Presuppositions and Discourse: Essays Offered to Hans Kamp. Emerald Group Publishing, Bingley

Birner BJ, Ward G (1994) Uniqueness, familiarity, and the definite article in English. BLS 20:93-102

Birner BJ, Ward G (1998) Informational status and noncanonical word order. John Benjamins, Philadelphia Chierchia G, McConnell-Ginet S (1990) Meaning and grammar. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Delin J, Oberlander J. (1995) Syntactic constraints on discourse structure: The case of it-clefts. Linguistics 33: 465-500

Fraurud K (1990) Definiteness and the processing of noun phrases in natural discourse. J Semantics 7:395-433

Frege G (1892) Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik 100: 25-50. Trans. as ‘On sense and reference’, in Geach P, Black

20

M (eds) (1952) Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege. Blackwell, Oxford

Frege G (1918-19) The thought: A logical inquiry. Geach P (trans) (1955) Mind 65:289-311

Gauker C (2008) Against accommodation: Heim, van der Sandt, and the presupposition projection problem. Philosophical Perspectives 22, Philosophy of Language: 171-205

Geurts B (1995) Presupposing. Dissertation, University of Stuttgart

Grafton SN (2010) U is for undertow. Berkley Books, New York

Grice HP (1975) Logic and conversation. In: Cole P, Morgan JL (eds) Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts. Academic Press, New York. Reprinted in Grice P (1989)

Grice P (1981) Presupposition and conversational implicature. In: Cole P (ed) Radical pragmatics. Academic Press, New York. Reprinted in Grice P (1989)

Grice P (1989) Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Hawkins JA (1978) Definiteness and indefiniteness. Humanities Press, Atlantic Highland, NJ

Hawkins JA (1991) On (in)definite articles: implicatures and (un)grammaticality prediction. J Linguist 27:40-5-442

Horn LR (1969) A presuppositional analysis of only and even. In: Binnick RI, Davison A, Green GM, Morgan JL (eds) CLS 5:98-116

Horn LR (1981) A pragmatic approach to certain ambiguities. Linguist Philos 4: 321-358

Horn LR (1986) Presupposition, theme and variations. In: Farley AM, Farley PT, McCullough K-E (eds) Papers from the Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory, CLS 22:168-192

Horn LR (2007) Toward a Fregean pragmatics: Voraussetzung, Nebengedanke, Andeutung. In: Kecskes I, LR (eds) Explorations in pragmatics: Linguistic, cognitive and intercultural aspects. Mouton de Gruyter, New York

Horn LR (2013) I love me some datives: Expressive meaning, free datives, and F-implicature. In: Gutzmann D, Gärtner H-M (eds) Beyond expressives: Explorations in use-conditional meaning. Brill, Boston

21

Horn LR, Abbott B (2012) <the, a>: (in)definiteness and implicature. In: Kabasenche WP, O’Rourke M, Slater MH (eds) Reference and referring: Topics in Contemporary Philosophy10:325-355

Karttunen L (1974) Presupposition and linguistic context. Theor Linguist 1: 181-194. Reprinted in: Davis S (ed) (1991) Pragmatics: A reader. Oxford University Press, New York

Karttunen L, Peters S (1979) Conventional implicature. In: Oh C-K, Dineen DA (eds) Syntax and Semantics 11: Presupposition. Academic Press, New York

Kiparsky P, Kiparsky C (1970) Fact. In: Bierwisch M, & Heidolph KE (eds) Progress in linguistics. Mouton, The Hague

Lewis D (1979) Scorekeeping in a language game. J Philos Logic 8:339-359

Neale S (1999) Coloring and composition. In: Stainton R, Murasugi K (eds) Philosophy and linguistics. Westview, Boulder, CO

Oberlander J, Delin J (1996) The function and interpretation of reverse wh-clefts in spoken discourse. Lang Speech 39:185-227 Poesio M, Vieira R (1998) A corpus-based investigation of definite description use. Comput Linguist 24:183-216

Potts C (2005) The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Predelli S (2003) Scare quotes and their relation to other semantic issues. Linguist Philos 26:1-28

Prince EF (1978) A comparison of WH-clefts and it-clefts in discourse. Language 54:883-906

Roberts C (1996) Information structure in discourse: Toward an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. In: Yoon JH, Andreas Kathol A (eds) Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 49:91–136

Simons M (2001) On the conversational basis of some presuppositions. SALT 11

Simons M (2003) Presupposition and accommodation: Understanding the Stalnakerian picture. Philos Stud 112:251-278

Simons M, Tonhauser J, Beaver D, Roberts C (2010) What projects and why. In: SALT 20:309-327

22

Simons M, Beaver D, Roberts C, Tonhauser J (2013) Projection as a function of information structuring. Paper presented at the 2013 Workshop in Philosophy and Linguistics, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Simons M, Kummerfeld E, Beaver D, Roberts C, Tonhauser J (2014) The best question: Explaining the projection behavior of factives. To appear in Discourse Process

Stalnaker RC (1973) Presuppositions. J Philos Logic 2:447-457 Stalnaker RC (1974) Pragmatic presuppositions. In: Milton MK, Unger PK (eds) Semantics and philosophy. New York University Press, New York. References are to the reprint in Davis S (ed) (1991) Pragmatics: A reader. Oxford University Press, New York

Strawson PF (1950) On referring. Mind 59:320-344 Strawson PF (1952) Introduction to logical theory. Methuen, London. References are to the 1967 University Paperback edition Tonhauser J, Roberts C, Beaver D, Simons M (2013) Toward a taxonomy of projective content. Language 89:66-109

23