PRESUPPOSITION AND NEGATION

Experimental Work in Presupposition and Presupposition Projection

Recent years have seen a surge of experimental approaches to the study of natural language meaning, both to get solid data on subtle phenomena hard to assess through introspection, and to understand how abstract characterizations of linguistic knowledge relate to real-time cognitive processes in language comprehension. The present paper reviews work in one of the most recent areas to see extens...

Presupposition and implicature

A note on this draft I’m allowed 10,000 words and definitely won’t be given more than this draft’s ≈14K. I find this an awkward length for such a huge topic — too long for a quick high-level overview, too short for an in-depth investigation. My response was to try to touch on all the major themes. I’d thus be extremely grateful for information about topics and references that I missed on the cu...

Presupposition and Cooperation

Felicity and Presupposition Triggers

Many current pragmatic approaches to presupposition, beginning at least with Stalnaker (1974), are based on a notion of felicity. Presuppositions are requirements a sentence places upon a context for an utterance of that sentence to be felicitous. These requirements in turn are induced by the presence of certain presupposition triggers, such as lexical items like factive verbs, or constructions...

Givenness and Maximize Presupposition

Based on word order patterns in Czech, I argue that a cross-linguistically common partitioning of a sentence between given and new material is a result of an interplay of independently needed pragmatic notions: the Maximize Presupposition principle of Heim (1991) and presupposition failure. I formalize the intuition by introducing presuppositions by a freely insertable recursive operator which ...