It is a somewhat vexed question whether presuppositions are always accommodated into the global context of utterance of the sentence, or whether they may sometimes be accommodated into a local context - the context of some subsentential constituent. Von Fintel (2008) argues that there is no local accommodation. He shows that presuppositions in the scope of universally quantified sentences, which have traditionally been handled via local accommodation (eg Heim 1983), can be accounted for by assuming that conversational participants (...) select a domain of quantification such that every relevant element of it has the property required by the presupposition in the scope. It is shown that this domain selection mechanism cannot account for a related set of data involving presupposition triggers in the restrictor rather than scope of the universal. We also discuss the relationship between quantified sentences and conditionals, and general consequences for the theory of presupposition accommodation. (shrink)

There are three ways to refer to a fact from the complement of afactive verb: (1) Via abstract object anaphoric reference, or, witha full sentential complement that will be interpreted either (2) asa bound presupposition or (3) as triggering a presupposition of afact that will have to be accommodated. Spoken corpus examplesreveal that these three possibilities differ in relation to thetype of information they tend to contribute, and this has twoeffects. First, the information status of the fact and (...) its role inthe discourse seem to affect the preference for one constructionover another in a particular context. Second, presupposed factivecomplements that need to be accommodated tend to be hearer-new andthe focus of the utterance, meaning that information structureseems to contribute to the felicity of accommodation ofpresupposed facts. (shrink)

In his paper “What is a Context of Utterance?”, Christopher Gauker argues that the phenomenon of informative presuppositions is incompatible with the “pragmatic” view of presuppositions as involving requirements on the common ground, the body of shared assumptions of the participants in a conversation. This is a surprising claim since most proponents of this view have in fact dealt with informative presuppositions by appealing to a process called presupposition accommodation. Gauker’s attack shows the need to clarify the nature (...) of this process. (shrink)

These are the comments I gave at Ohio State in October 2006 on Kai von Fintel’s paper on presupposition accommodation.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims at providing an account of an indirect mechanism responsible for establishing one's power to issue biding directive acts; second, it is intended as a case for an externalist account of illocutionary interaction. The mechanism in question is akin to what David Lewis calls presupposition accommodation: a rule-governed process whereby the context of an utterance is adjusted to make the utterance acceptable; the main idea behind the proposed account is (...) that the indirect power-establishing mechanism involves the use of imperative sentences that function as presupposition triggers and as such can trigger off the accommodating change of the context of their utterance. According to the externalist account of illocutionary interaction, in turn, at least in some cases the illocutionary force of an act is determined by the audience's uptake rather than by what the speaker intends or believes; in particular, at least in some cases it is the speaker, not her audience, who is invited to accommodate the presupposition of her act. The paper has three parts. The first one defines a few terms — i.e., an “illocution”, a “biding act”, the “audience's uptake” and an “Austinian presupposition” — thereby setting the stage for the subsequent discussion. The second part formulates and discusses the main problem of the present paper: what is the source of the agent's power to perform binding directive acts? The third part offers an account of the indirect power-establishing mechanism and discusses its externalist implications. (shrink)

In this paper I elaborate on previous criticisms of the influential Stalnakerian account of presuppositions, pointing out that the well-known practice of informative presupposition puts heavy strain on Stalnaker’s pragmatic characterization of the phenomenon of presupposition, in particular of the triggering of presuppositions. Stalnaker has replied to previous criticisms by relying on the well-taken point that we should take into account the time at which presupposition-requirements are to be computed. In defense of a different, ‘semantic’ account of (...) the phenomenon of presupposition, I argue that that point does not suffice to rescue the Stalnakerian proposal, and I portray Lewisian ‘accommodation’ as one way in which speakers adjust themselves to one another in the course of conversation. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of Stalnaker''s work on presupposition (Stalnaker1973, 1974, 1979, 1999, 2002). The paper examines two definitions of speaker presupposition offered by Stalnaker – the familiar common ground view, and the earlier,less familiar, dispositional account – and how Stalnaker relates this notion to the linguistic phenomenon of presupposition. Special attention is paid to Stalnaker's view of accommodation. I argue that given Stalnaker's views, accommodation is not rightly seen as driven by the (...) presuppositional requirements of utterances, but only by the interests of speakers in eliminating perceived differences among presuppositions. I also consider the revisions which are needed either to the definition of speaker presupposition or to the definition of sentence presupposition in light of the possibility of informative presupposition. In the concluding section, I discuss the ways in which some recent accounts of context and speaker presupposition depart from their Stalnakerian foundations. (shrink)

According to one view of linguistic information, a speaker can convey contextually new information in one of two ways: by asserting the content as new information; or by presupposing the content as given information which would then have to be accommodated. This distinction predicts that it is conversationally more appropriate to assert implausible information rather than presuppose it. A second view rejects the assumption that presuppositions are accommodated; instead, presuppositions are assimilated into asserted content and both are correspondingly open to (...) challenge. Under this view, we should not expect to find a difference in conversational appropriateness between asserting implausible information and presupposing it. To distinguish between these two views of linguistic information, we performed two self-paced reading experiments with an on-line stops-making-sense judgment. The results of the two experiments—using the presupposition triggers the and too—show that accommodation is inappropriate relative to non-presuppositional controls when the presupposed information is implausible but not when it is plausible. These results provide support for the first view of linguistic information: the contrast in implausible contexts can only be explained if there is a presupposition-assertion distinction and accommodation is a mechanism dedicated to reasoning about presuppositions. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the dominant approaches to presupposition projection and proposes an alternative. Both the update semantics of Heim and the discourse representation theory of van der Sandt have problems in explicating the presuppositions of disjunctions. Moreover, Heim's approach is committed to a conception of accommodation that founders on the problem of informative presuppositions, and van der Sandt's approach is committed to a conception of accommodation that generates over-interpretations of utterances. The present approach borrows Karttunen's idea that (...) instead of associating presuppositions with sentences, we should define the conditions that contexts must meet in order to satisfy-the-presuppositions-of a sentence. However, in place of Karttunen's conception of contexts in terms of common ground, the present theory substitutes a conception of contexts as objective entities that are independent of the attitudes of the interlocutors. Contexts, so conceived, may be defined as containing sets of relevant possibilities. This allows us to define the conditions under which a context satisfies-the-presuppositions-of a disjunction. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on four questions which help to understand the presupposition accommodation as Lewis defines it. The first is a question about how we recognize that an utterance involves a presupposition. The second question is about what it is to accommodate. The third question has to do with the role of scoreboard in accommodation. The fourth question has to do with Lewis's ceteris paribus condition. The chapter considers the characterization of accommodation due to Thomason, (...) and argues that it appropriately extends the range of phenomena taken to involve accommodation. It discusses a theory of the scoreboard building on Lewis's characterization which crucially reflects the interlocutors’ recognized goals and plans in language game, and argues that this type of scoreboard plays a natural role in facilitating and constraining accommodation. The author argues that some strong limits are a natural consequence of the nature of the game and its scoreboard. (shrink)

Scalar implicatures arise when a speaker uses a logically weak alternative in a context where a logically stronger alternative was available. Presuppositional implicatures, as I call them, arise when a speaker uses a presuppositionally weak alternative when a presuppositionally stronger alternative was available. My goal is to give a detailed, working theory of presuppositional implicatures, and show that they are a special case of scalar implicatures. In doing so, I carefully contrast presuppositional implicatures with antipresuppositions. These two phenomena have been (...) treated as closely related in the literature, but some differences have not been adequately appreciated. Antipresuppositions are observed when a presuppositionally weak alternative is infelicitously used in a context that satisfies the presupposition of a presuppositionally stronger alternative. Presuppositional implicatures arise when a presuppositionally weak alternative is felicitously used in a context that does not satisfy the presupposition of a presuppositionally stronger alternative, but where that stronger presupposition would have been accommodated. Attention to this difference reveals a shortcoming in Schlenker’s theory of presuppositional implicature. This paper both identifies and remedies that shortcoming. (shrink)

Drawing on work from Marina Sbisà’s “Ideology and the Persuasive Use of Presupposition” (1999), Rae Langton has developed a powerful account of the subtle mechanisms through which hate speech and propaganda spread. However, this model has a serious limitation: it focuses too strongly on individual speech acts isolated from their wider context, rendering its applicability to a broader range of cases suspect. In this chapter, I consider the limits of presupposition accommodation to clarify the audience’s role in (...) helping hate speakers, and claim the necessary mechanisms are much more active and social than Langton suggests, with effects not capturable in the analysis of isolated speech acts. I revisit Sbisà’s work on presupposition and develop an alternative model that (1) improves upon the Langtonian model for explaining the power of hate propaganda, and (2) is more in line with Sbisà’s original approach to ideology and the normative aspects of presupposition. (shrink)

The key to an adequate account of presupposition projection is to accommodate the fact that the presuppositions of a sentence cannot always be read off the sentence but can often be identified only on the basis of prior utterances in the conversation in which the sentence is uttered. In addition, an account of presupposition requires a three-valued semantics of assertibility and deniability in a context. Presuppositions can be explicated as sentences that belong to the conversation and the assertibility (...) of which ensures that the remaining assertibility and deniability conditions of the presupposition-bearing sentence are dual to one another. The prevailing approach to presuppositions, grounded in Heim’s context-change semantics, can be criticized both on philosophical grounds and for failing to accommodate the phenomena. (shrink)

Grammatical theories of Scalar Implicatures make use of an exhaustivity operator exh, which asserts the conjunction of the prejacent with the negation of excludable alternatives. We present a new Grammatical theory of Scalar Implicatures according to which exh is replaced with pex, an operator that contributes its prejacent as asserted content, but the negation of scalar alternatives at a non-at-issue level of meaning. We show that by treating this non-at-issue level as a presupposition, this theory resolves a number of (...) empirical challenges faced by the old formulation of exh (as well as by standard neo-Gricean theories). The empirical challenges include projection of scalar implicatures from certain embedded environments (‘some under some’ sentences, some under negative factives), their restricted distribution under negation, and the existence of common ground-mismatching and oddness-inducing implicatures. We argue that these puzzles have a uniform solution given a pex-based Grammatical theory of implicatures and some independently motivated principles concerning presupposition projection, cancellation and accommodation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In ‘Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game’, Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simplified model of that phenomenon. (...) I argue further that, once we are clear about why Langton and West's account fails, a different and more plausible account of pornography's influence emerges. (shrink)

The “Authority Problem” is the problem that arises when speakers who lack authority successfully perform speech acts that require speaker authority in order to be felicitous. One solution that has been offered to the Authority Problem holds that the non-authoritative speaker of a successful authoritative illocution comes to have authority through a process of presupposition accommodation. I call this solution the Authority Accommodation Analysis, or AAA. In this paper, I argue that there is no Authority Problem, and (...) thus, no need for an AAA. The appearance of the problem relies on a conflation between the _felicity_ of speech acts and their _success_. Yet a speech act can be successfully performed even in the absence of felicity. While authority is often a felicity condition for certain speech acts, I argue that it need not be a success condition. Ultimately, the consequence of my argument is that I must reject conventionalism about illocutionary success. (shrink)

By appeal to the phenomenon of presupposition accommodation, Rae Langton and others have proposed that speakers can gain genuine authority over their audiences when they implicitly claim such autho...

We discuss presupposition, the phenomenon whereby speakers mark linguistically the information that is presupposed or taken for granted, rather than being part of the main propositional content of a speech act. Expressions and constructions carrying presuppositions are called “presupposition triggers”, forming a large class including definites and factive verbs. The article first introduces the range of triggers, the basic properties of presuppositions such as projection and cancellability, and the diagnostic tests used to identify them. The reader is then (...) introducedto major models of presupposition from the last 50 years, separated into three classes: Frege-Strawson derived semantic models, pragmaticmodels such as that offered by Stalnaker, and dynamic models. Finallywe discuss some of the main current issues in presupposition theory. These involve accommodation, which occurs when a hearer's knowledge state is adjusted to meet the speaker's presuppositions; presupposition failure, which occurs when a presupposition is false; the interaction between presuppositions and attitudes; and the triggering problem, i.e., the problem of explaining why presuppositions occur in the first place. (shrink)

In this paper, I review a number of arguments in favor of treating many of the central cases of presupposition as the result of conversational inference, rather than as lexically specified properties of particular expressions. I then argue that, despite the standard assumption to the contrary, the view of presupposition as constraints on the common ground is not consistent with the provision of a conversational account of particular presuppositional constraints. The argument revolves crucially around the workings of (...) class='Hi'>accommodation. I then offer an alternative view of the phenomenon of presupposition, which is compatible with a variety of sources for presuppositions. On the view offered here, presupposition is seen as a property of utterances. I argue that the presuppositions of an utterance are those propositions which an interpreter must take the speaker to accept in order to take the speaker to be fully cooperative, in the Gricean sense. (shrink)

1This work was supported in part by the projects TRINDI (Task Oriented Instructional Dialogue), EC Project LE4-8314, SDS (Swedish Dialogue Systems), NUTEK/HSFR Language Technology Project F1472/1997, INDI (Information Exchange in Dialogue), Riksbankens Jubileumsfond 1997-0134, and SIRIDUS (Specification, Interaction, Reconfiguration in Dialogue Understanding Systems), EC Project IST-1999-10516, and ILT (Interactive Language Technology), Vinnova Project 2001-6340. To appear in Presuppositions and Discourse ed. by Rainer Bäuerle, Uwe Reyle and Thomas Ede Zimmermann, Elsevier, Amsterdam.

In this paper it is shown how a partial semantics for presuppositions can be given which is empirically more satisfactory than its predecessors, and how this semantics can be integrated with a technically sound, compositional grammar in the Montagovian fashion. Additionally, it is argued that the classical objection to partial accounts of presupposition projection, namely that they lack “flexibility,” is based on a misconception. Partial logics can give rise to flexible predictions without postulating any ad hoc ambiguities. Finally, it (...) is shown how the partial foundation can be combined with a dynamic system of common-ground maintenance to account for accommodation. (shrink)

Strawson :96–118, 1964) argued that definite NPs trigger presuppositions as an aspect of their conventional meanings, and this semantic conception of presupposition triggers is incorporated into the binding theory of presuppositions. The phenomenon of presupposition denials, however, presents a problem for the semantic conception of presupposition triggers, for in such denials the alleged semantic presuppositions seem to be “cancelled” by a negation operator. Geurts :274–307, 1998; Presupposition and pronouns, 1999) attempts to solve this problem by utilizing (...) the binding theory’s allowance for local accommodation. Geurts’ proposal, however, is inadequate, primarily because Geurts formulates the binding theory within discourse representation theory, which makes no allowance for the illocutionary force of denial. Asher and Lascarides’ segmented discourse representation theory, however, has the resources to account for the illocutionary force of denial. Utilizing a version of SDRT I demonstrate that the “cancelling” of a presupposition by echoic negation in presupposition denials crucially depends upon the denial of information that is pragmatically communicated by accommodation. (shrink)

Presuppositions are capable of projecting from under the scope of operators such as negation, but do not obligatorily do so. This creates a potential difficulty for the hearer of presupposition-bearing utterances, especially given the fact that speaker can use presupposition to convey entirely new information. In this paper, I discuss the potential role of context in resolving this tension, and in particular, I argue that the inferences that are drawn about the current discourse purpose may be materially relevant (...) to the interpretation of potential presuppositions. I also consider some of the implications of this for recent experimental work on presupposition and projection. (shrink)

Speaker authority can spring into existence via accommodation mechanisms: a speaker acts as if they had authority and they can end up obtaining it if nobody objects. Versions of this claim have been advanced by Rae Langton, Ishani Maitra, Maciej Witek, and others. In this paper, I shift the focus from speaker to hearer authority. I develop a three-staged argument, according to which (i) felicity conditions for illocution can be recast in presupposition terms; (ii) just as certain illocutions (...) require speaker authority, there are also illocutions requiring hearer authority; (iii) accommodation may provide a way to confer authority to one’s audience, rather than gain it for oneself. Speakers sometimes act as if their hearer had authority, and the hearer can end up obtaining it solely by playing along. In closing, I pause on the potentially problematic interplay between informal authority conferral and social norms of female deference to men. (shrink)

All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, the contributors investigate three mental mechanisms, widely assumed to underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation. This volume brings together experts from semantics and pragmatics to bring forward the study of interconnections between these three mechanisms. The contributions develop new insights into important empirical phenomena; for example, approximation, free choice, accommodation, and exhaustivity effects.

We relate the theory of presupposition accommodation to a computational framework for reasoning in conversation. We understand presuppositions as private commitments the speaker makes in using an utterance but expects the listener to recognize based on mutual information. On this understanding, the conversation can move forward not just through the positive effects of interlocutors’ utterances but also from the retrospective insight interlocutors gain about one anothers’ mental states from observing what they do. Our title, ENLIGHTENED UPDATE, highlights such (...) cases. Our approach fleshes out two key principles: that interpretation is a form of intention recognition; and that intentions are complex informational structures, which specify commitments to conditions and to outcomes as well as to actions. We present a formalization and implementation of these principles for a simple conversational agent, and draw on this case study to argue that pragmatic reasoning is holistic in character, continuous with common-sense reasoning about collaborative activities, and most effectively characterized by associating specific, reliable interpretive constraints directly with grammatical forms. In showing how to make such claims precise and to develop theories that respect them, we illustrate the general place of computation in the cognitive science of language. (shrink)

Since Kripke introduced rigid designation as an alternative to the Frege/Russell analysis of referential terms as definite descriptions, there has been an ongoing debate between 'descriptivists' and 'referentialists', mostly focusing on the semantics of proper names. Nowadays descriptivists can draw on a much richer set of linguistic data (including bound and accommodated proper names in discourse) as well as new semantic machinery (E-type syntax/semantics, DRT, presupposition-as-anaphora) to strengthen their case. After reviewing the current state of the debate, I argue (...) for a referentialist semantics that incorporates some modern insights from the side of the descriptivists in order to account for the new data in a principled fashion. (shrink)

Contrary to what seems to be predicted by a Strawson-inspired view, in presupposition denials the presupposition triggered by, e.g., ‘the king of France’ seems to be cancelled. To explain this puzzling instance of the projection problem, defenders of a Strawson-inspired view have proposed various ad hoc ambiguities. I develop a version of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory that explains the puzzling presupposition-cancelling phenomenon relying only on independently motivated pragmatic processes. Appealing to Kripke’s “test” for the adequacy of ambiguity (...) motivating counterexamples, I argue that my analysis is to be preferred over proposals that posit ad hoc ambiguities. Two key insights of my analysis are, first, that the “cancellation” of presuppositions in presupposition denials depends upon the illocutionary effects of rejection and correction, and, second, that the process of presupposition accommodation often involves the speaker performing an ancillary sort of speech act, viz. the speech act of presupposing. (shrink)

What licenses the use of a definite description? The formal and philosophical literature has approached this question in two ways. The uniqueness approach (Frege, 1892; Russell, 1905; Strawson, 1950) holds that we may use a definite determiner only if the property denoted by its complement holds of exactly one individual in some domain: Sentence (1) and (2) can only be true if there is exactly one king of France, and exactly one American governor, respectively. Since this is not the case (...) in the actual world, the sentences are either false or (on most modern accounts) fall prey to a presupposition failure. (shrink)

This paper brings a developmental perspective to the discussion of a longstanding issue surrounding the proper characterization of presuppositions. On an influential view (Stalnaker in Synthese 22(1–2):272–289, 1970; Stalnaker, in Milton, Unger (eds) Semantics and philosophy, New York University Press, New York, 1974; Karttunen in Theor Linguist 1:181–194, 1974), formal presuppositions reflect admittance conditions: an utterance of a sentence which presupposes _p_ is admitted by a conversational context _c_ only if _p_ is common ground in _c_. The theory distinguishes two (...) modes of satisfying this formal requirement: (i) presuppositions may have common ground status prior to utterance, or (ii) they may achieve common ground status post hoc, via accommodation, an adjustment of the common ground by cooperative listeners so as to meet the requirements of an uttered sentence. While intuitive and general, the theory has been criticized (among other things) on methodological grounds (see e.g. Gazdar in Pragmatics: implicature, presupposition and logical form, Academic Press, New York, 1979): the availability of accommodation makes it difficult to empirically examine the notion of presupposition as admittance conditions because a central tenet—pragmatic infelicity results whenever _c_ does not entail _p_—may be masked due to the pragmatic sophistication of language users. In this paper, we argue that child language presents an opportunity to avoid this intrinsic difficulty. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that young children generate a default expectation that the presuppositions of an asserted sentence have common ground status prior to utterance. Furthermore and more tellingly, we also find that even when accommodation is the preferred option for adults, children fail to accommodate presuppositions in an adult-like manner. This pattern of behavior, we argue, is expected under the admittance theory: in a population where the interference from accommodation is reduced, the impact of failing to satisfy the formal admittance conditions becomes directly observable. (shrink)

This article surveys and discusses the core points of contact between notions of information structure and notions of presupposition. Section 1 is devoted to the ‘weak’ presuppositional semantics for focus developed by Mats Rooth, describing its properties with regard to verification and accommodation and showing that it can successfully account for a wide range of phenomena. Section 2 examines the stronger thesis that focus–background structures give rise to existential presuppositions, and finds the counterarguments that have been raised to (...) carry considerable weight. Section 3 looks into the relationship between Givenness and run-of-the-mill presuppositions, finding that this relationship is looser than might be expected, mainly because a presupposition may be in need of focus marking instead of givenness marking. (shrink)

The paper presents a numerical interpretation of the quantifiers of traditional categorical propositions and then offers a generalization to accommodate all other numerical values. Next, it considers the implications possible on the basis of both minimum and maximum existential presuppositions; and finally, it shows that every pair of categorical premises yields multiple conclusions when appropriate minimum and maximum presuppositions are made for the terms of the premises.

In this paper we are going to show that error coping strategies play an essential role in linguistic pragmatics. We study the effect of noisy speaker strategies within a framework of signalling games with feedback loop. We distinguish between cases in which errors occur in message selection and cases in which they occur in signal selection. The first type of errors affects the content of an utterance, and the second type its linguistic expression. The general communication model is inspired by (...) the Shannon–Weaver communication model. We test the model by a number of benchmark examples, including examples of relevance implicatures, quantity implicatures, and presupposition accommodation. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a novel analysis of presuppositions, paying particular attention to the interaction between the knowledge resources that are required to The analysis has two main features. First, we capture an analogy between presuppositions, anaphora and scope ambiguity (cf. van der Sandt 1992), by utilizing semantic under-specification (c£ Reyle 1993). Second, resolving this underspecification requires reasoning about how the presupposition is rhetorically connected to the discourse context. This has several consequences. First, since pragmatic information plays a (...) role in computing the rhetorical relation, it also constrains the interpretation of presuppositions. Our account therefore provides a formal framework for analysing problematic data, which require pragmatic reasoning. Second, binding presuppositions to the context via rhetorical links replaces accommodating them, in the sense of adding them to the context (cf. Lewis 1979). The treatment of presupposition is thus generalized and integrated into the discourse update procedure. We formalize this approach in SDRT (Asher 1993; Lascarides & Asher 1993), and demonstrate that it provides a rich framework for interpreting presuppositions, where semantic and pragmatic constraints are integrated. (shrink)

This paper deals with a series of semantic contrasts between the copula be and the preposition as, two functional elements that both head elementary predication structures. It will be argued that the meaning of as is a type lowering device shifting the meaning of its complement NP from the type of generalized quantifiers to the type of properties (where properties are conceived as relations between individuals and situations), while the copula be induces a type coercion from (partial) situations to (total) (...) possible worlds. Paired with van der Sandt's (1992) theory of presupposition accommodation, these assumptions will account for the observed contrasts between as and be. (shrink)

Two recent and influential papers, van Rooij 2007 and Lassiter 2012, propose solutions to the proviso problem that make central use of related notions of independence—qualitative in the first case, probabilistic in the second. We argue here that, if these solutions are to work, they must incorporate an implicit assumption about presupposition accommodation, namely that accommodation does not interfere with existing qualitative or probabilistic independencies. We show, however, that this assumption is implausible, as updating beliefs with conditional (...) information does not in general preserve independencies. We conclude that the approach taken by van Rooij and Lassiter does not succeed in resolving the proviso problem. (shrink)

Are color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal ("armchair") judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on entailment patterns and one based (...) on presupposition accommodation, that investigate the meaning of scalar adjectives. We find evidence confirming the existence of subgroups of the population who operate with different standards for color adjectives. The evidence of interpersonal variation in where standards are located on the relevant scale and how those standards can be adjusted indicates that the existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives are at best only partially correct. We also find evidence that paradigmatic relative adjectives ("tall", "wide") behave in ways that are not predicted by the standard theory of scalar adjectives. We discuss several different possible explanations for this unexpected behavior. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings for philosophical debates about the nature and extent of semantically encoded context sensitivity in which color adjectives have played a key role. (shrink)

Stalnaker’s conception of context as common ground possesses unquestionable explanatory power, shedding light on presupposition, presupposition accommodation, the behavior of certain types of conditionals, epistemic modals, and related phenomena. The CG-context approach is also highly abstract, so merely pointing out that it fails to account for an aspect of communication is an inconclusive criticism. Instead our question should be whether it can be extended or modified to account for such a phenomenon while preserving its spirit. To that (...) end, this essay assesses the prospects of the CG-context approach for making sense of the variety of ways in which interlocutors accept propositions as well as non-propositional contents, some different types of conversation and the norms distinctive of these different types, some pre-illocutionary pragmatic phenomena, conversational injustice, and fictional discourse. (shrink)

Importation in fictional discourse is the phenomenon by which audiences include information in the story over and above what is explicitly stated by the narrator. This paper argues that importation is distinct from generation, the phenomenon by which truth in fiction may outstrip what is made explicit, and draws a distinction between fictional truth and fictional records. The latter comprises the audience’s picture of what is true according to the narrator. The paper argues that importation into fictional records operates according (...) to principles that also govern ordinary conversation. An account of fictional records as a species of common ground information is proposed. Two sources of importation are described in detail, presupposition accommodation and conversational implicatures. It is shown that presuppositions are both mandatorily imported and mandatorily generated. By contrast, conversational implicatures are neither mandatorily imported nor mandatorily generated. The paper distinguishes conversational implicatures from contextual inferences. Both rely on background assumptions, yet conversational implicatures moreover depend on assumptions concerning Gricean cooperation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the viability of accounting for presumptions as a subtype of verdictives, within the framework of the Austinian approach to speech acts. The available set of felicity conditions is examined and worked out, in order to try and account in particular for a main feature of presumptions, namely, their function in shifting the burden of proof. In order to extend the Austinian framework as required, the notion of pragmatic presupposition accommodation is (...) shown to be a useful device. (shrink)

Rae Langton and Caroline West famously argue that pornography operates like a language game, in that it introduces certain views about women into the common ground via presupposition accommodation. While this pragmatic model explains how pornography has the potential to change its viewers’ beliefs, it leaves open how pornography changes people's desires. Our aim in this paper is to show how Langton and West's discourse-theoretic account of pornography can be refined to close this lacuna. Using tools from recent (...) developments in discourse theory, we propose that pornography issues implicit directives, and thereby introduces bouletic components into the discourse. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have begun to uncover the role played by verbal conduct in generating oppressive social structures. I examine the oppressive illocutionary uses, and perlocutionary effects, of expressives: speech acts that are not truth-apt, merely expressing attitudes, such as desires, preferences, and emotions. Focusing on expressions of disgust in conversation, I argue for two claims: that expressions of disgust can activate in the local, conversational context the oppressive power of the underlying structures of oppression; that conversational expressions of (...) disgust can, via the pragmatic process of presupposition accommodation, contribute to morally problematic cases of disgust contagion. (shrink)

The chapter aims to provide the theoretical background that is necessary to understand the research questions addressed by the chapters in this collection. We identify and discuss the key claims grounding Sbisà’s deontic approach to speech actions, while locating her contribution within the broader literature on speech acts and their nature. In particular, we focus on her distinctive Austinian-inspired understanding of the conventionality of illocutionary acts, their core effects, and the role of presupposition accommodation in force assignment. We (...) close with an outline of the collection’s structure and contents. (shrink)

A central method of systemic therapy is the use of so called systemic questions. With these questions the therapist provides the client with an alternative and possibly less problematic description of reality. Since clients tend to tacitly accept these implicit offers by the therapist, systemic questions are often ascribed a "hypnotic" effect. In this paper, I will explain the "hypnotic" effect of systemic questions with the linguistic phenomenon of presupposition accommodation. For instance, in "Scorekeeping in a Language Game", (...) David Lewis points out that speakers tend to tacitly accept the presuppositions of an utterance, because an utterance is only appropriate if its presuppositions are already part of common ground. Starting from this, I will argue with von Fintel's 'Hey, wait a minute' test that the implicit offers of systemic questions are nothing more than presuppositions of these questions. First, this will provide an explanation of the "hypnotic" effect of systemic question via the phenomenon of presupposition accommodation. In addition, it will explain how the implicit offers of systemic questions enable a new description of reality on the part of the client. In this way, the present paper is an example of how philosophy of language can be applied to problems outside of philosophy, providing further evidence that the research area of applied philosophy of language is real. (shrink)

In traditional formal semantics the notions of reference, truth and satisfaction are basic and that of representation is derivative and dispensable. If a level of representation is included in the formal presentation of the theory, it is included as a heuristic. Semantics in the traditional sense has no bearing on any form of mental processing. When reference is understood within this framework, cognitive neuroscience cannot possibly provide any insights into the nature of reference. Traditional semantics, however, has numerous shortcomings that (...) render it inadequate as an account of natural language. Dynamic semantic theories, such as discourse representation theory (DRT), treat ever­growing, revisable mental representations as the basic semantic entities. Within this framework, there are two central notions of reference. New information may refer back to previously introduced discourse referents and discourse referents may refer to worldly entities. Because DRT treats mental representations as indispensable elements of the theory, evidence from neuroscience, particularly the recording of electroencephalograms (EEG) and its derivative event-­related potentials (ERPs), can reasonably be thought to shed light on meaning and reference within this framework. In this chapter I first review the advantages of DRT in accommodating linguistic data and then review data from neuroscience that seem to support it. Finally, I consider some methodological concerns that have been raised about the neuroscientific approach to semantics. (shrink)

This paper builds upon Mary Kate McGowan’s analysis of the mechanisms of harm in conversations (McGowan 2004; 2009). McGowan describes how a speaker’s intervention might constitute harm by enacting what is permissible to do in the conversation thereafter. We expand McGowan’s analysis in two ways: first, we use her account to argue for the potential of interlocutor’s silence, not only speaker’s intervention, to enact harm; second, we introduce a new party into the picture: observers of the conversation. We propose that (...) not only interlocutors who contribute to harm through action, but also those who do so by omission are morally responsible for that harm. We focus on one aspect of conversations: introduction of presuppositions. We argue that when the presupposition is morally problematic (e.g., sexist, ableist, racist, homo-, trans- or xeno-phobic), interlocutors have a moral responsibility to block it. This responsibility comes in degrees, and, importantly, depends on whether the interlocutor’s speech capacity is diminished by the harmful presupposition (i.e. whether the interlocutor is being silenced). Unlike common approaches to harm in speech, which take the unit of analysis to be the speaker-interlocutor relationship, we take as unit of analysis the relationship between the pair speaker-interlocutor and an observer. Problematic presuppositions introduced in conversations can harm observers overhearing these conversations (as well society as a whole), and prevention of such harm motivates our proposal for attribution of responsibility to interlocutors. We proceed as follows. First we review the dynamics of presupposition introduction. Second, we briefly introduce McGowan’s analysis of conversational pragmatics, subscribing to her account that some conversational moves constitute a special type of harm related to oppression, and outline a taxonomy of the pathways through which harm can be inflicted upon observers and the society as a whole. In the third part we articulate our argument that in the cases of presupposition introduction considered here, interlocutors are not merely allowing harm, but actively doing it, and put forward our proposal for responsibility attribution. Finally, we address potential objections, and situate our proposal within a broader project to fight oppressive speech. (shrink)

Several theories of presupposition projection predict that some sentences which intuitively yield unconditional presuppositions should have weaker, conditional ones. For instance, If John is realistic, he knows that he is incompetent is predicted to have the presupposition that if John is realistic, he is incompetent, whereas one certainly infers that John is in fact incompetent. We summarize some difficulties faced by three solutions, DRT, Singh’s ‘Formal Alternatives’, and Singh’s ‘Interacting Alternatives’; we then offer a new analysis which is (...) compatible with several semantic theories of projection, and which does not require the addition of a new representational module. In essence, we obtain unconditional inferences by assuming that speakers may ignore certain parts of a sentence when they accommodate a presupposition—presumably to simplify their computational work. They do so by adding to the context an assumption that would satisfy the presupposition of the sentence no matter which meaning some of its elements have. Depending on which elements are ignored in this way, a variety of strengthened presuppositions are obtained. We speculate on a possible mechanism (which follows some of Singh’s earlier ideas) to determine which of these strengthened inferences are in fact obtained. The analysis correctly predicts some new instances of the Proviso Problem in quantificational examples. (shrink)

The previous volume of the series Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science at Warsaw University---entitled Imperatives from Different Points of View---was the first result of the project Theory of Imperatives and Its Applications realized by the group composed by Anna Brożek, Jacek Jadacki and Berislav Žarnić. The project was supported by the Foundation for Polish Science within the program Homing Plus. One of the most important points of this project was the International Symposium Imperatives in Theory and Practice which took (...) place in Warsaw, on the 18th and 19th May, 2012. The symposium was the meeting of many specialists in the domain of the theory of imperatives – from China, Croatia, Japan, Poland and The United States. Contents: Berislav Žarnić, Logical Root of Linguistic Commitment; Jacek Jadacki, Witwicki’s Square; Tomoyuki Yamada, On the Very Idea of Imperative Inference; Fengkui Ju, Semantics of Sentences in Mixed Moods of Indicative and Imperative; Piotr Kulicki & Robert Trypuz, Two Faces of Obligation; Bartosz Brożek, Types of Obligations; Anna Brożek, Functional Ambiguity of Imperatives; Anna Brożek, Logic of Prescriptions and Instruction; Aleksandra Horecka, Imperative Sentence as a Performative Sentence, which Refers to the Optative State of Affairs; Jakub Bazyli Motrenko, The Concept of Praxiological Directive; Maciej Witek, How to Establish Authority with Words: Imperative Utterances and Presupposition Accommodation; Wojciech Załuski, Remarks on the Lexical Order of Rawls’s Two Principles of Justice; Natalia Miklaszewska, Acts of Will as Convictions; Anna Brożek, Imperatives in the Gospel. (shrink)

This paper deals with the semantics of de dicto , de re and de se belief reports. First, I flesh out in some detail the established, classical theories that assume syntactic distinctions between all three types of reports. I then propose a new, unified analysis, based on two ideas discarded by the classical theory. These are: (i) modeling the de re/de dicto distinction as a difference in scope, and (ii) analyzing de se as merely a special case of relational de (...) re attitudes. The resurrection of these ideas takes place in a dynamic setting. My formalization of the first idea involves a modification of the presupposition-as-anaphora resolution algorithm for DRT. The second involves treating acquaintance relations as second-order presuppositions, to be bound in the context by means of higher-order unification, or accommodated if necessary. The resulting framework requires no syntactic distinctions between different modes of attitude, with the exception of a specific subclass of de se reports characterized by special ‘ de se pronouns’ (i.e. PRO and logophors). These special pronouns are handled in syntax; everything alse is passed on to the pragmatic resolution module as it appears on the surface. The more sophisticated contextual resolution process nonetheless ensures adequate output truth conditions for a variety of classical and novel puzzles. In particular, I compare the new pragmasemantic system to the classical, syntactic analysis with respect to iterated and quantified reports, and monstrously shifted indexicals. (shrink)