Although it is widely agreed, if often only tacitly, that there is a close connection between focus and presupposition, recent research has tended to shy away from the null hypothesis, which is that focus is systematically associated with presupposition along the following lines: The Background-Presupposition Rule (BPR) Whenever focusing gives rise to a background λx.φ(x), there is a presupposi...

With respect to how comprehenders process presupposition and handle presupposition failure when verifying sentences, at least two hypotheses are possible: (1) presuppositions are treated like preconditions for evaluating the truth or falsity of a sentence, and are systematically verified before the assertion, and (2) presuppositions are 'backgrounded' and therefore taken for granted—meaning tha...

Recent semantic research has made increasing use of a principle, ‘Maximize Presupposition’, which requires that under certain circumstances the strongest possible presupposition be marked (Sauerland 2006). This principle is generally taken to be irreducible to standard (neo-) Gricean reasoning because, by definition, the forms that are in competition have the same assertive component (Percus 20...

The behaviour of presupposition triggers in human language has been extensively studied and given rise to many distinct theoretical proposals. One intuitively appealing way of characterising presupposition is to argue that it constitutes backgrounded meaning, which does not contribute to updating the conversational record, and consequently may not be challenged or refuted by discourse participa...

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 ...

This paper considers a set of presupposition triggers including focus, questions, ‘contrastive’ statives, and an ‘affirmation/negation’ construction involving and not, where presuppositions are cancelable. It is proposed that these constructions, rather than having strict semantic presuppositions, have representations involving alternative sets in the sense of alternative semantics of questions...