7/31/2021 Presupposition (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Presupposition
First published Fri Apr 1, 2011; substantive revision Thu Jan 7, 2021

We discuss presupposition, the phenomenon whereby speakers mark

linguistically information as being
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 a sample of
triggers, the basic properties of
presuppositions such as projection
and cancellability, and the diagnostic tests used to identify them.
The
reader is then introduced to major models of presupposition from
the last 50 years, separated into three
classes: Frege-Strawson
derived semantic models, pragmatic models such as that offered by
Stalnaker, and
dynamic models. Finally we 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 (known to be) false; the
interaction between
presuppositions and attitudes; and variability in the behavior of
triggers and their
presuppositions.

1. Characterizing Presupposition
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Projection
1.3 Cancellability
2. The Frege-Strawson tradition
3. Pragmatic presupposition
4. Local contexts and the dynamic turn
4.1 Presupposition and anaphora
4.2 Satisfaction in local contexts
4.3 Satisfaction theories
5. Accommodation
5.1 Global and Local Accommodation
5.2 Accommodating Presuppositions in Satisfaction Framework
5.3 Resolving and Accommodating Presuppositions in DRT
6. Born to fail, or unborn?
7. Presuppositions and attitudes
8. Presupposition variability
Bibliography
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries

1 Characterizing Presupposition
1.1 Introduction
Speakers take a lot for granted. That is, they presuppose
information. As we wrote this, we presupposed that
readers would
understand English. We also presupposed as we wrote the last sentence,
repeated in (1), that
there was a time when we wrote it, for otherwise
the fronted phrase “as we wrote this” would not have
identified a time interval.

(1) As we wrote this, we presupposed that readers would understand

English.

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Further, we presupposed that the sentence was jointly authored, for

otherwise “we” would not have referred.
And we presupposed
that readers would be able to identify the reference of
“this”, i.e., the article itself. And
we presupposed that
there would be at least two readers, for otherwise the bare plural
“readers” would have
been inappropriate. And so on.

Note that some of these presuppositions arise by default from specific

words that we used. The existence of a
time when we wrote the article
is a requirement associated with our use of “as”. It is a
requirement built into
the meaning of the temporal preposition
“as”, which has a similar meaning to temporal "while",
that in a
phrase “as X”, the
“X” has to hold at some time. We say that
“as” is a presupposition trigger. Similarly,
“this”
is a presupposition trigger requiring something
salient to refer to, the bare plural is a presupposition trigger
requiring existence of multiple individuals, and “would”
is a presupposition trigger requiring a salient future
or hypothetical
circumstance.

In contrast, some of the presuppositions above have nothing to do with

the meanings of any of those words.
For example, we can say that the
presupposition that the addressee speaks English, like the
presupposition
that the addressee is interested in what the speaker
(or writer) has to say, is a conversational presupposition
or, following Stalnaker (1972; 1974), speaker presupposition
or pragmatic presupposition. The
presuppositions associated
with specific triggers are said to be conventional or
semantic. The terminological
distinction between semantic and
pragmatic presupposition is of theoretical import: as we will see
later, some
theorists regard it as an open question whether there are
any purely conventional presuppositions. A halfway
house, suggested
for example by Karttunen (1973) and Soames (1982), is to define a
notion of utterance
presupposition, thus involving a specific
form that is uttered, but allowing that what is actually presupposed
may depend also on the attitudes of the speaker who utters it.

It is important to note that to call presuppositional expressions

“conventional” or “semantic” is not
necessarily to imply that the presuppositions they trigger don’t
depend on the context in any way. For
example, although
“this” may be viewed as a conventional presupposition
trigger, the interpretation very
much depends on the context, and the
presupposition, although typically regarded as conventional, is
normally seen precisely as a constraint on the utterance context.

What makes presuppositions special? That is, to the extent that

presuppositions are just a part of the
conventional meaning of some
expressions, what makes them sufficiently distinctive that they merit
their
own entries in handbooks and encyclopedias, as well as many
hundreds of other articles and book chapters
elsewhere? First,
presuppositions are ubiquitous. And second, there are various respects
in which the
behavior of presuppositions differs sharply from other
aspects of meaning.

As regards the ubiquity of presuppositions, at least the following

lexical classes and constructions are widely
agreed to be
presupposition triggers:

factives (Kiparsky and Kiparsky, 1970)

Berlusconi knows that he is signing the end of Berlusconism.

→ Berlusconi is signing the end of Berlusconism.

aspectual verbs (“stop, continue”) (Simons,
2001; Abusch, 2002; Lorenz, 1992)

China has stopped stockpiling metals.

→ China used to stockpile metals.

temporal clauses headed by “before”,
“after”, “since”, etc. (Beaver and
Condoravdi, 2003;
Heinämäki, 1974)

The dude released this video before he went on a killing spree.

→ The dude went on a killing spree.

manner adverbs (Abbott, 2000)

Jamie ducked quickly behind the wall.

→ Jamie ducked behind the wall.

sortally restricted predicates of various categories (e.g.,
“bachelor”) (Thomason, 1972)

Julius is a bachelor.

→ Julius is an adult male.

cleft sentences (Delin, 1995; Prince, 1986)

It was Jesus who set me free.

→ Somebody set me free.

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quantifiers (Roberts, 1995; Gawron, 1995; Abusch and

Rooth, 2000; Cooper, 1983)

I have written to every headmaster in Rochdale.

→ There are headmasters in Rochdale.

definite descriptions (Strawson, 1950)

The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago stood up and wagged his
finger.

→ Trinidad and Tobago have a (unique) prime minister.

names (van der Sandt, 1992)

The author is Julius Seidensticker.

→ Julius Seidensticker exists.

intonation (e.g., focus, contrast) (Jackendoff, 1972;
Geurts and van der Sandt, 2004; Roberts, 1998)

HE set me
free.[1]

→ Somebody set me free.

And this is only a small sample of the words and syntactic

constructions that have been classified as
presupposition triggers, so
even if in some cases there may be doubts about this diagnosis, it can
hardly be
doubted that presupposition triggers abound in everyday
language. In the following sections we will discuss
the behaviors
which mark out presuppositions from ordinary entailments, and then
introduce some of the
theories that have been developed to account for
those behaviors.

1.2 Projection
The hallmark of presuppositions, as well as the most thoroughly
studied presuppositional phenomenon, is
projection
(Langendoen and Savin, 1971). Consider (2). This has all the
presuppositions in (3). These
presuppositions all follow from
utterances of the base sentence in (2), as do the regular entailments
in (4):
someone who sincerely uttered (2) would certainly be expected
to accept the truth of (3) and (4), as well:

(2) It’s the knave that stole the tarts.

(3a) There is a (salient and identifiable) knave.
(3b) There were (salient and identifiable) tarts.
(3c) Somebody stole the tarts.
(4a) The knave did something illegal.
(4b) The knave took possession of the tarts.

Now consider the sentences in (5):

(5a) It isn’t the knave that stole the tarts. (negation)

(5b) If it’s the knave that stole the tarts, he will be punished.
(antecedent of a conditional)
(5c) Is it the knave that stole the tarts? (question)
(5d) Maybe/It is possible that it’s the knave that stole the tarts.
(possibility modal)
(5e) Presumably/probably it’s the knave that stole the tarts.
(evidential modal, probability adverb)
(5f) The king thinks it’s the knave that stole the tarts. (belief
operator)

In all these examples, sentence (2) is embedded under various

operators. What is notable is that whereas the
statements in (4) do
not follow from any of these embeddings (and would not be expected to
follow
according to classical logics), the presuppositions do follow.
We say that the presuppositions are projected.
Certainly, the
inference is more robust in some cases than in others: while it is
hard to imagine sincerely
uttering (5a) without believing some tarts
to be salient, it is easier to imagine a circumstance in which (5f)
could be uttered when in fact the tarts were not stolen, but hidden.
But in the absence of special factors, to
which we will turn shortly,
someone who sincerely uttered any of the sentences in (5) might be
expected to
believe all of the presuppositions in (3a)–(3b).

Projection from embeddings, especially negation, is standardly used as

a diagnostic for presupposition
(hence the term “negation
test”). However it is important to try several types of
embedding when testing for
presupposition for a few different reasons.
First of all, it is not always clear how to apply a given embedding
diagnostic. For example, although it is widely agreed that the
additive particle “too” is a presupposition-
inducing
expression, the negation test is awkward to apply because it is not
immediately clear whether the
negation outscopes the additive or
vice versa in (6b), and it’s not obvious how the negation
interacts with
focus:
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(6a) Fred kissed BETTY, too.

(6b) Fred didn’t kiss BETTY, too.

We leave it as an exercise for the reader to show that embedding (6a)

under a different operator e.g., under a
modal or in the antecedent of
a conditional, provides evidence that this sentence presupposes that
someone
other than Betty was kissed by Fred.

Additionally, some inferences seem to project from negation but not

other embeddings. For example, both
(7a) and (7b) seem to presuppose
that the speaker has sensory experience with the pie, and this type of
data
has led some to conjecture that uses of predicates of personal
taste are associated with a presupposition that
the judgment of taste
resulted from direct
experience.[2]
However, we don’t get any projection of this
inference from the
conditional in (7c), and example (7d) seems to imply that the speaker
has not tasted the
pie themselves. This data suggests that any account
claiming a presupposition of direct experience for
predicates of
personal taste needs to be highly nuanced.

(7a) The pie is tasty.

(7b) The pie isn’t tasty.
(7c) If the pie is tasty, it will go quickly.
(7d) Is the pie tasty?

More generally, such examples demonstrate why it’s important to look

at a wide range of embeddings when
identifying presuppositions on the
basis of their projection behavior.

1.3 Cancellability
What makes the “projection problem” problematic? If some
part of the meaning of an expression α was
never affected by the
linguistic context in which α was embedded, that would be
philosophically interesting,
and would demand a theoretical
explanation, but it would at least be trivial to completely describe
the data:
all presuppositional inferences would survive any embedding,
end of story. But that isn’t what happens.
Presuppositions typically
project, but often do not, and most of the empirical and theoretical
work on
presupposition since the 1970s has been taken up with the task
of describing and explaining when
presuppositions project, and when
they don’t.

When a presupposition does not project, it is sometimes said to be

“cancelled”. The classic cases of
cancellation occur when
the presupposition is directly denied, as in the following variants of
some of the
sentences in (5):

(8a) In this court, it isn’t the knave that steals the tarts: the king
employs no knaves precisely because he
suspects they are responsible
for large-scale tart-loss across his kingdom.
(8b) If it’s the knave that stole the tarts, then I’m a Dutchman: there
is no knave here.
(8c) Is it the knave that stole the tarts? Certainly not: there is no
knave here.
(8d) The king thinks it’s the knave that stole the tarts, but he’s
obviously gone mad, since there is no knave
here.

Presuppositional inferences are typically subject to cancellation by

direct denial only when the
presupposition trigger is embedded under
some other operator. When the presupposition is not embedded,
such
cancellation (by the same speaker) is usually infelicitous, just as is
cancellation of entailed content
which is not embedded. Thus the
denial of a presupposition in (9) and the denial of an ordinary
entailment in
(10) both lead to pragmatically infelicitous utterances
(marked by a “#”).

(9) #It’s the knave that stole the tarts, but there is no knave.

(10) #It’s the knave that stole the tarts, but he didn’t do anything
illegal.

The fact that presuppositions associated with unembedded triggers are

not cancellable, except in an outright
retraction of what the speaker
has previously claimed, is one of the features that distinguishes most
presuppositions from Gricean conversational implicatures (Grice,
1989). For example, an utterance of (11a)
might ordinarily lead to the
so-called scalar implicature in (11b). But while this implicature is
cancellable, as
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in (11c), the presupposition that there is a knave,

once again, is not cancellable, as shown by the oddity of
(11d).

(11a) The knave stole most of the tarts.

(11b) The knave did not steal all of the tarts.
(11c) The knave stole most of the tarts—in fact, he stole them
all.
(11d) #The knave stole most of the tarts, but there was no knave.

We can summarize the typical behavior of entailments, presuppositions,

and conversational implicatures as
follows:

  Entailments Presuppositions Implicatures

Project from embeddings no yes no
Cancellable when embedded — yes —
Cancellable when unembedded no no yes

Because presuppositions are typically only cancellable when embedded,

Gazdar (1979a, 1979b) argues that
presuppositions are usually entailed
when the trigger is not embedded.

The literature is choc-a-bloc with examples of presuppositional

inferences apparently disappearing. Whether
such examples are
appropriately described as involving cancellation is partly a
theoretical decision, and, as
we will see, many scholars avoid using
the term “cancellation” for some or all such cases. One
reason for
this is that the term “cancellation” appears to
suggest that an inference has been made, and then removed.
But in many
cases there are theoretical reasons not to regard it as an apt
characterization, and in considering
early views on presupposition in
the next section, we will come across one class of such cases
(specifically,
cases involving hypothetical reasoning in
conditionals).

2. The Frege-Strawson tradition

The early literature on presupposition almost exclusively revolved
around definite descriptions, which are
said to presuppose the
existence of a unique referent. A problem arises when a definite
description, like the
King of France, fails to refer. Russell
(1905) claimed that sentences like "The King of France is bald" are
false because the logical form of definite descriptions contains a
false existential claim. However, Strawson
(1950) famously argued
against Russell’s theory by proposing that when a definite description
fails to refer,
the result can be a sentence which lacks a truth
value. Thus presuppositions are understood as definedness
conditions,
necessary requirements for an expression to have a meaning.

Strawson’s intuition, which can be traced back to Frege (1892), leads

to the following
definition:[3]

Definition 1 (Strawsonian presupposition)

One sentence presupposes another iff whenever the first is true

or false, the second is true.

Another definition that is often used is this:

Definition 2 (Presupposition via negation)

One sentence presupposes another iff whenever the first

sentence is true, the second is true, and whenever
the negation of the
first sentence is true, the second sentence is
true.[4]

hese two definitions are equivalent if negation maps true onto false,
false onto true, and is undefined when its
argument is undefined.
However, the second definition is notable in the context of the above
discussion of
projection, because it seems to directly encode the
projection properties of at least one operator: negation.
Specifically, it says that presuppositions are inferences that survive
embedding under
negation.[5]

It is clear that if the above assumptions about presupposition are

made, then the presuppositions of a
sentence will be the same as the
presuppositions of the negation of the sentence. But what about
projection
from embeddings other than negation? A very simple account
of projection is based on the cumulative
hypothesis, first
discussed by Morgan (1969) and Langendoen and Savin (1971). This is
the idea that
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presuppositions always project from embedding, as if

there were no effects like cancellation. A trivalent
semantics that
yields this behavior is obtained by using the Weak Kleene
connectives (Kleene, 1952).
Assume (for all the partial/multivalent
semantics given in this article) that for classically valued
arguments,
the connectives behave classically. Then Weak Kleene
connectives (also known as the Bochvar Internal
connectives) are
defined as follows:

Definition 3 (Weak Kleene)

If any argument of a sentence with a Weak Kleene connective lacks a

classical truth value, then the
sentence as a whole lacks a truth
value.

Weak Kleene fails as a theory of presupposition because it entails

that presuppositions project uniformly,
whereas in fact they do not.
Another system of Kleene’s, the Strong Kleene connectives, does not
have this
property:

Definition 4 (Strong Kleene)

If the classically-valued arguments of a sentence with a Strong Kleene

connective would suffice to
determine a truth value in standard logic,
then the sentence as a whole has that value; otherwise it doesn’t
have
a classical value.

For example, in classical logic a conjunction is bound to be false if

one of its conjuncts is false, and therefore
the same holds for Strong
Kleene “and”. Similarly, since in classical logic a
disjunction must be true if one of
its disjuncts is true, the same
holds for Strong Kleene “or”. We obtain the following
truth tables for the main
binary connectives:

Conjunction Disjunction Implication

φ ∧ ψ t f ✭ φ ∨ ψ t f ✭ φ → ψ t f ✭
t t f ✭ t t t t t t f ✭
f f f f f t f ✭ f t t t
✭ ✭ f ✭ ✭ t ✭ ✭ ✭ t ✭ ✭

Now consider the following example:

(12) If there is a knave, then the knave stole the tarts.

Let’s ignore all presupposition triggers in (12) save “the

knave”, and show that Strong Kleene predicts that
the sentence
as a whole does not presuppose that there is a knave. Using Definition
1, it suffices to find at
least one model where (12) has a classical
truth value, but in which there is no knave. This is easy: in such a
model, the antecedent is false, and inspection of the above Strong
Kleene table shows that when the
antecedent of a conditional is false,
the conditional is true, as would be the case classically. In fact,
Strong
Kleene predicts no presupposition for (12). This is in
contradistinction to Weak Kleene, which would fail to
give (12) a
classical value in knave-less models, and hence predict that (12)
presupposes the existence of a
knave.

There are other cases where Strong Kleene does predict a

presupposition, and the presupposition predicted is
not what we might
have expected. Thus Strong Kleene gives (13a) a classical truth value
in all models where
there is a knave, and in all models where there
was trouble. So while we might have expected the
presupposition in
(13b), Strong Kleene predicts the presupposition in
(13c).[6]
We will return to this issue
shortly.

(13a) If the knave stole the tarts, then there was trouble.
(13b) There is a knave.
(13c) If there was no trouble, then there is a knave.

Much of the discussion of partial and multivalent approaches to

presupposition over the last three decades
has centered on the
treatment of
negation.[7]
Specifically, the issue has been the treatment of cancellation
examples like (14).

(14) The tarts were not stolen by the knave: there is no knave.
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A standard approach is to propose that negation is ambiguous between a

presupposition-preserving negation
and a presupposition-denying
negation; see e.g., the discussion by Horn (1985, 1989). The
presupposition-
preserving negation (aka choice negation) we
have already seen, and it is found in both the Weak and Strong
Kleene
systems. The presupposition-denying (or exclusion) negation
is typically taken to map true to false
and false to true, as usual,
but also to map an argument lacking a classical value to true. Thus if
(14) is
interpreted in a model where there is no knave, but
“not” is understood as a presupposition-denying negation,
then “the tarts were stolen by the knave” would lack a
classical value, but “The tarts were not stolen by the
knave”, and (14) as a whole, would be true.

3. Pragmatic presupposition
Probably the most significant philosophical counterpoint to the
Frege-Strawson approach to presupposition,
other than the original
non-presuppositional work of Russell, is due to Stalnaker (1972, 1973,
1974), and
later clarified in Stalnaker
(1998).[8]
Stalnaker suggests that a pragmatic notion of presupposition is
needed,
so that the proper object of philosophical study is not what
words or sentences presuppose, but what people
presuppose when they
are speaking. A pragmatic presupposition associated with a sentence is
a condition
that a speaker would normally expect to hold in the common
ground between discourse participants when
that sentence is
uttered.[9]

One consequence of Stalnaker’s view is that, contra semantic

accounts of presupposition, presupposition
failure need not produce a
semantic catastrophe. There are, however, two weaker types of failure
that can
occur: (i) a speaker uttering some sentence
S can fail to assume that some proposition P is in
the common
ground, even though most utterances of S would be
accompanied by the presupposition that P; and (ii) a
speaker can presuppose something that is not in the common ground. We
see these two types of failure
respectively in (15a), where there is
no presupposition that Mullah Omar is alive, and (15b) where it is
presupposed that Luke was alive.

(15a) I don’t know that Mullah Omar is alive. I don’t know if he’s dead
either. (General Dan McNeill,
Reuters, 19 May 2008)
(15b) Vader didn’t know that Luke was alive, so he had no intentions of
converting Luke to the Sith. (Web
example)

These examples involve a subclass of factive verbs called

"semifactives," which Karttunen (1971b)
concluded only trigger a
presupposition in some person and tense forms. As Karttunen himself
realized, such
a stipulation is unmotivated. For Stalnaker’s pragmatic
account of presupposition, these examples are not
problematic; the
verb "know" need not presuppose that its complement is true. When an
addressee hears the
first sentence of (15a), he will realize that if
it were in the common ground that Mullah Omar was alive, then
the
speaker would know this, and so the speaker’s claim would be false.
Therefore the hearer can reason that
the speaker is not presupposing
the complement of “know” to be true. On the other hand,
when a hearer is
confronted by (15b), it is consistent to assume that
Luke was alive. Since speakers using “know” typically
presuppose the truth of the complement, we can assume that this is the
case here.

Stalnaker’s work was part of an avalanche of pragmatic attacks on the

semantic conception of
presupposition. Working in the immediate
aftermath of Grice’s 1967 William James lectures[10],
accounts
like Atlas (1976; 1977; 1979), Atlas and Levinson (1981),
Kempson (1975), Wilson (1975), and Böer and
Lycan (1976) all
present detailed arguments that presuppositions should be understood
as something akin to
conversational implicatures. Generally speaking,
these approaches justify presuppositional inferences by
using the
maxims of relevance and quantity. Thus, for example, Atlas (1976)
suggests that an embedding of a
definite under a negation will tend to
produce a meaning that is ruled out as insufficiently strong to
satisfy
the maxim of quantity, unless it is strengthened by treating
the definite as if it had wide scope and could act
referentially.
Contemporary descendants of this pragmatic tradition include Abbott
(2000; 2006; 2008),
Simons (2001; 2003; 2004; 2006; 2007), and
Schlenker (2007; 2008). Both Abbott and Simons are at pains
to
distinguish between different presupposition triggers, rather than
lumping them all together. Thus Simons,
for example, makes a case for
deriving presuppositional inferences associated with factives and
aspectual
adverbs using a combination of Stalnakerian and Gricean
reasoning, allowing that typically anaphoric
triggers like the
additive “too” might function conventionally. On the other
hand, Schlenker’s pragmatic

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derivation of projection properties, using

both standard maxims and at least one rule specific to
presuppositions[11],
does not make fine-grained distinctions between presupposition
triggers.

There is a contrast among pragmatic approaches to presupposition as

regards whether the source of
presuppositions is discussed. The
approaches mentioned in the preceding paragraph, which attempt to
derive
presuppositional inferences from general conversational
principles, aim to explain both the source of
presuppositions, and the
phenomenon of projection. But Stalnaker made no attempt whatsoever to
explain
where presuppositions came from, beyond indicating that they
are inferential tendencies that might or might
not be associated with
semantic presuppositions. This emphasis on the projection of
presuppositions rather
than their source, which holds also of the
contemporaneous work by Karttunen (1974; 1973), to which we
shall turn
shortly, lived on in much of the work influenced by these theories. It
is particularly obvious in what
we can collectively term
cancellation-based theories of presupposition, led by Gazdar
(1979a; 1979b), and
including Soames (1979; 1982), Mercer (1987;
1992), Gunji (1981), Marcu (1994), Horton (1987), Horton
and Hirst
(1988), Bridge (1991), and van der Sandt (1982; 1988).

Cancellation accounts can be traced back in spirit to Stalnaker’s

account of semifactives, discussed above, in
which presuppositions are
defeated by competing conversational inferences: the general idea is
simply to
make presuppositions into defaults, and wipe them out
whenever they would cause pragmatic
embarrassment. Gazdar provided a
remarkably straightforward formalization of this account, as well as
extending to many other projection phenomena, based on a general
principle he characterizes as “All the
news that fits”. In
Gazdar’s model, the strategy for a hearer is first to identify sets of
entailments,
conversational implicatures, and presuppositions, and
then to try adding them to the speaker’s set of
commitments.

Definition 5 (Gazdar: cancellation)

Implicatures and entailments defeat presuppositions, so a hearer adds

to his or her commitments only
those presuppositions that are
compatible with both implicatures and entailments. All remaining
presuppositions are cancelled.

Consider (16a), and assume there are no relevant pre-existing

commitments:

(16a) If the king is angry, then the knave stole the tarts.
(16b) If there is a knave, then the knave stole the tarts.

According to Gazdar, (16a) entails that if there is an angry king then

there is a knave and he stole some set of
tarts. (This much all
theories agree on; some theories may predict stronger entailments.)
The set of
implicatures would include the clausal implicature that the
speaker doesn’t know whether a king is angry,
and doesn’t know whether
a knave stole tarts. The presuppositions (or “potential
presuppositions”, in
Gazdar’s terms) are that there is a unique
king, a unique knave, and a unique set of tarts. The hearer proceeds
by adding the entailments to (their representation of) the speaker’s
commitment set, then adding whatever
implicatures fit in, and then
adding the presuppositions that fit after that. In this case, all the
entailments,
implicatures, and presuppositions are consistent, and all
can be added without any being cancelled.

But now consider (16b), repeated from (12). Here there is an

implicature that the speaker doesn’t know
whether there is a knave.
The hearer accepts this and other implicatures, and then considers the
presuppositions that there is a knave and that there are some tarts.
The presupposition that there are tarts is
unproblematic, and is
added, but the hearer cannot consistently add the presupposition that
there is a knave.
So this presupposition is canceled, and (16b) does
not presuppose that there is a knave. Hence, according to
Gazdar,
presuppositions are sometimes blocked by conversational
implicatures.

Within the space of cancellation-based accounts of presupposition, it

is hard to beat Gazdar’s for its
conceptual and technical simplicity,
and its empirical coverage. Some conceptual questions remain, however,
such as why it should be that presuppositions are the last
things to be added in the process of updating
commitments. Van der
Sandt’s (1982, 1988) reformulation of the cancellation model gives us
an alternative
way to think about this, by modeling projection in
terms of whether presuppositions could have come first.

Definition 6 (Van der Sandt: cancellation)

Project only those presuppositions that could be conjoined to the

beginning of the sentence while leaving

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the utterance consistent with

(neo-Gricean) conversational
principles.[12]

The intuitive idea underlying van der Sandt’s proposal is that

presuppositions are given information, and in
this sense
“precede” their carrier sentences, if not de
facto then at least de jure, in the sense that the
context
would have legitimated their presence. In the case of (16),
fronting the presupposition that there are some
tarts yields the
sentences in (17).

(17a) There are some tarts and if the king is angry then the knave stole
the tarts.
(17b) There are some tarts and if there is a knave, then the knave stole
the tarts.

The fronting of the presupposition does not lead to a clash with any
Gricean principles, so the
presuppositions are predicted to project in
(16a) and (16b). Similarly, fronting the presupposition that there is
a knave to (16a), as in (18a), produces no clash, so (16a) presupposes
that there is a knave. But adding the
presupposition that there is a
knave to (16b), as in (18b), does result in a clash: since (18b) is
truth-
conditionally equivalent to the simple conjunction “there
is a knave and the knave stole the tarts”, it is
redundant,
conflicting with the requirement of brevity in Grice’s Maxim of
Manner. On van der Sandt’s
analysis, if fronting a presupposition
would produce a redundant result, then that presupposition cannot
project. So (16b) is correctly predicted not to presuppose that there
is a knave.

(18a) There is a knave and if the king is angry then the knave stole the
tarts.
(18b) There is a knave and if there is a knave, then the knave stole the
tarts.

It should be noted, however, that even if (18b) is redundant, it is

arguably a felicitous discourse, and
therefore some subtlety is needed
in applying van der Sandt’s cancellation principle in the simplified
form
above. The issue is not simply whether a discourse is felicitous,
but whether there is any clash with the
maxims. And this will of
course depend on how exactly the maxims are formulated. But for the
purposes of
understanding the intention of van der Sandt’s analysis,
we can take it that though an utterance of (18b) could
be felicitous,
it would be a case of flouting (in Grice’s sense), a case
where a maxim is disobeyed in order to
preserve some greater
conversational goal.

A more recent pragmatic approach situates presuppositions in a wider

taxonomy of projective content based
on the property of
at-issueness. Once we’ve identified the QUD, we can identify
content that is meant to be
relevant towards answering it. In other
words, content that is at-issue. Simons et al (2010) propose that
this
pragmatic property is relevant to projection such that only
not-at-issue content projects.

Definition 7 (Cancellation via at-issueness)

Project only those presuppositions that are not-at-issue.

Consider examples (19) and (20) from Beaver (2010). These examples
involve the factive verb "discover",
and hence are expected to trigger
a presupposition that its complement is true, i.e. that the
addressee’s work
is plagiarized. In (19), where "discover" is
stressed, this presupposition seems to project, with the implication
that, absent the T.A. finding out what’s going on, the speaker is
prepared to overlook the plagiarism. In this
case, we might say that
what is at-issue is the question of whether the T.A. finds out about
the plagiarism.
However, in (20), where stress in on "plagiarized", it
is far less clear whether the speaker believes the
addressee’s work is
plagiarized. This can be explained if stress on "plagiarized" is
marking the proposition
that the work is plagiarized as at-issue. So,
the generalization in Definition 7 predicts that this proposition
does
not project.

(19) If the T.A. disCOVers that your work is plagiarized, I will be

forced to notify the Dean.
(20) If the T.A. discovers that your work is PLAgiarized, I will be
forced to notify the Dean.

Pragmatic approaches to presupposition take the burden of projection

off conventional triggering and allow
for discourse structure to
influence projection when triggers are placed in different contexts.
One
consequence of this view is that it can be applied
cross-lingustically (e.g. Tonhauser et al 2013) without
running into
the issue of language-specific conventionalized triggers. Additionally
it allows us to account for
the projection of expressions that don’t
display other properties that we associate with presupposition, for
example appositives, expressives and honorifics (Potts 2005). In other
words, there’s a reason why some
things that aren’t presuppositions
still behave like them.

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A new trend of psycholinguistic research potentially offers some

promising new evidence about the degree to
which presuppositions are
processed like pragmatic inferences or semantic entailments. The
methods in these
studies typically rely on identifying at what point
during the processing of an utterance presuppositions
become available
to the listener. The line of reasoning goes like this: if
presuppositions are conventionally
encoded in their triggers and are
conditions for contexts to update, they should arise immediately when
a
trigger is used. However, if presuppositions are the result of
pragmatic reasoning, there should be a delay in
their processing.
While the results of these studies have been somewhat inconsistent,
they largely suggest
that presuppositions are processed immediately.
For example, one of the experiments in Tiemann et al.
(2011) finds
that presupposition triggers themselves carry a processing cost
relative to other non-
presuppositional expressions. In an eye-tracking
study, Kim (2008) finds that there are shifts in eye
movements quite
rapidly after the utterance of the trigger only. These
studies and the methodologies used in
them are still relatively
new. However, empirical work on the processing of presuppositions
remains a
promising strand of research in determining the extent to
which we can consider presuppositions to be
conventional

4. Local contexts and the dynamic turn

In static theories of meaning, such as the trivalent accounts of
presupposition discussed above, when a
sentence is interpreted in a
given context, every expression in that sentence is interpreted
relative to that
same context. In dynamic theories of meaning, the
context is allowed to change as a sentence is interpreted.
The
earliest and perhaps still clearest motivation for this dynamism is
what might be termed the anaphoric
asymmetry. The anaphoric
asymmetry consists in pronouns across languages being usually resolved
to
expressions that have already occurred, and only being resolved
cataphorically to expressions that occur later
in the sentence in
quite special configurations. The dynamic explanation for this is that
pronouns are resolved
to referents via the context, and that the
context is updated during processing so that it typically only
contains
information about things that have already been mentioned.
The question might then be asked: how does the
processing of anaphora
relate to the processing of presuppositions? It turns out that there
are remarkably
strong parallels between phenomena involving anaphora
and presupposition, and this in turn provides a
motivation for
considering not only anaphora but also presupposition to be an
intrinsically dynamic
phenomenon. In this section, we will first study
the parallels between presupposition and anaphora, seen as a
possible
motivation for considering context change in analyzing presupposition,
and then describe in largely
historical terms the sequence of
developments that led to contemporary dynamic theories.

4.1 Presupposition and anaphora

While a number of authors have noted that presuppositions behave in
some respects like anaphors (e.g.,
Kripke 2009 and Soames 1989), it
was van der Sandt (1989; 1992) who brought out the connection the most
forcefully. He noted that for every configuration of anaphors and
antecedents where a pronoun is interpreted
anaphorically but is not
interpretable as a bound variable, a similar configuration is possible
with
presuppositions.[13]
In each of the following quadruples, we illustrate some configuration
in the (a) and (b)
examples, while the (c) and (d) cases show that a
slight divergence from the original configurations (i.e.
those in (a)
and (b)), produces infelicity. Note that the (a) and (c) examples
include an anaphoric pronoun
(“it”), and the (b) and (d)
examples include the factive verb “knows”, which triggers
a presupposition that its
propositional complement is true (i.e., that
Fred left). So, anaphora is felicitous in configurations in which
presuppositions are felicitous, and anaphora is infelicitous in
configurations in which presuppositions are
infelicitous. It is clear
that connections between anaphoric pronouns and their antecedents on
the one hand,
and presupposition triggers and their antecedents on the
other, are sensitive to very similar configurational
requirements.

Inter-sentential (discourse) anaphora

(21a) There was a storm. It was fierce.
(21b) Fred left. Mary knows that Fred left.
(21c) #It was fierce. There was a storm.
(21d) #Mary knows that Fred left. Fred left.

Donkey anaphora
(22a) If a farmer owns a donkey then he beats it.
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(22b) If Fred left then Mary knows that Fred left.

(22c) #If a farmer doesn’t own a donkey, then he beats it.
(22d) #If Fred didn’t leave left then Mary knows that Fred left.

Modal subordination
(23a) A wolf might come to the door. It would eat you.
(23b) Fred might have left. Mary would know that Fred has left.
(23c) #A wolf might come to the door. It’s brown.
(23d) #Fred might have left. Mary knows that Fred has left.

Bathroom anaphora
(24a) Either there’s no bathroom in this house, or else it’s in a
funny place.
(24b) Either Fred didn’t leave, or else Mary knows that he left.
(24c) #Either there is a bathroom, or else it’s in a funny place.
(24d) #Either Fred left, or else Mary knows that he left.

4.2 Satisfaction in local contexts

As previously noted, early work on presupposition was primarily
focused on definite descriptions, and
definite descriptions have
continued to be the paradigmatic example of a presupposition trigger
in
philosophical literature over the last fifty years. However, by the
early 1970s, more linguistically oriented
work had expanded the
empirical domain of presupposition theory from definite descriptions
to other trigger
types, including factives (Kiparsky and Kiparsky,
1970), implicatives (Karttunen, 1971a), focus particles
(Horn, 1969),
verbs of judging (Fillmore, 1971) and sortal constraints (Thomason,
1972). Stalnaker’s
discussion of Karttunen’s semifactives provides an
early example of how this linguistic expansion of the
empirical domain
has impacted philosophical work. Also by the early 1970s, linguists
had expanded the
empirical domain in another direction. The
philosophical literature was largely oriented towards unembedded
presupposition triggers and triggers under negation, but as we have
already mentioned, Morgan (1969) and
Langendoen and Savin (1971)
generalized the issue by considering arbitrary embeddings. However, it
was
not until Karttunen (1973) that the full complexity of the
projection problem became apparent. By
methodically considering
projection behavior construction by construction, Karttunen showed
that there was
more variation in projection behavior than had been
previously described, making it quite clear that none of
the extant
Frege-Strawson derived systems could hope to cover every case, and
this ultimately led to the
application of dynamic models of meaning to
the problem of presupposition projection.

Karttunen (1973) presented a taxonomy of embedding constructions that

divided them into three classes:
plugs, holes and
filters. Plugs comprise a class of predicates and operators
which Karttunen claimed block
the projection of presuppositions, while
holes are a class of predicates and operators which allow
presuppositions to project freely. So, for example, since “told
that” is a plug, according to
Karttunen,[14]
(25)
is predicted not to presuppose that there is a King of France.
On the other hand, since “perhaps” is a hole,
(26) is
predicted to presuppose that there is a King of France.

(25) Mary told Jim that the King of France was bald.

(26) Perhaps the King of France is bald.

Karttunen’s filters include the binary logical connectives “if

then”, “and”, and “or”. The intuition
behind the
filter metaphor is that these constructions allow only some
presuppositions to project, others being caught in
the filter, and we
have already seen examples of this phenomenon. Thus example (12)
showed that
sometimes a presupposition in the consequent of a
conditional does not project: here the presupposition that
there was a
knave is filtered out. But the same example includes an occurrence of
the definite “the tarts” in
the consequent, and the
presupposition that there are (or at least were) some tarts projects
from the
conditional. Karttunen concluded that the consequent of a
conditional acts as a hole to some presuppositions,
but filters out
all those presuppositions which are entailed by the antecedent, or,
more generally, by a
combination of the antecedent and contextually
supplied background information.

Karttunen’s key example showing the role of context bears

repetition:

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(27) Either Geraldine is not a mormon or she has given up wearing her
holy underwear.

The second half of (27) contains (at least) two presupposition

triggers: the definite description “her holy
underwear”
and the aspectual verb “give up”, which trigger the
presuppositions that Geraldine used to have
and wear holy underwear,
respectively. Karttunen’s filtering condition for disjunctions removes
from the
right disjunct any presuppositions that are entailed by a
combination of the context and the negation of the
left disjunct. Now
consider a context supporting the proposition that all mormons have
holy underwear
which they wear regularly. It follows from this
proposition and the negation of the left disjunct, i.e., the
proposition that Geraldine is a mormon, that Geraldine has holy
underwear and has worn it regularly. But
these are exactly the
presuppositions triggered in the right disjunct, so they are filtered
out. It follows that
(27) has no presuppositions.

Karttunen’s (1973) account is of interest not only for its triptych of

plugs, holes and filters, but also because
it sets the background for
a crucial shift of perspective in Karttunen (1974), and thence to the
dynamic
approaches to presupposition that have been dominant in recent
years. What remained unclear in the 1973
paper was the motivation for
filtering, i.e. why presuppositions should be filtered out when
entailed by other
material. Karttunen (1974) suggests an alternative
conception based on the idea of local contexts of
evaluation.
The idea is that the parts of a sentence are not necessarily evaluated
with respect to the same
context as that in which the sentence as a
whole is evaluated: a local context may contain more
information
than the global context. For example, when
evaluating a conjunction, the second conjunct is evaluated in a
local
context which contains not only the information in the global context,
but also whatever information
was given by the first conjunct.
Karttunen (1974) defines local contexts of evaluation for a range of
constructions, and suggests the following requirement: presuppositions
always need to be entailed (or
“satisfied”, as he put it)
in the local context in which the trigger is evaluated. Given this
requirement, the
overall presuppositions of a sentence will just be
whatever propositions must be in a context of an utterance
in order to
guarantee that the requirements associated with presupposition
triggers are satisfied in their local
contexts of interpretation.

Karttunen spelled out how local satisfaction should be calculated

separately for each connective and operator
he considered. However,
recent developments in Schlenker (2008) provide a general way of
calculating what
the local context should be. In the following
reformulation of Karttunen’s model we incorporate Schlenker’s
insights
along the lines proposed by Beaver (2008).

Let us say that some clause in a complex sentence is

redundant relative to some context of utterance if you
can
replace that clause by a tautology without affecting the amount of
factual information conveyed by the
sentence in that context. For
example, in (28), the first conjunct is redundant in any context of
utterance.
Here, the same factual information would be conveyed by
“Mary is Mary and Mary owns a sheep”, where
the first
conjunct is replaced by the tautology “Mary is Mary”.

(28) Mary owns an animal and Mary owns a sheep.

Now let us say that a clause is left-redundant if it is

possible to tell by looking at the material in the sentence
to the
left of the clause that the clause is redundant. So “Mary owns
an animal” is not left-redundant in (28)
(except if the context
of utterance already entails that Mary owns an animal), because there
is no material
before that clause, implying that it is impossible to
tell by looking at material to the left of the clause that the
clause
is redundant. On the other hand, the same sentential fragment,
“Mary owns an animal”, is left-
redundant in (29) and also
in (20):

(29) Mary owns a sheep and Mary owns an animal. (Truth-conditionally

equivalent to: Mary owns a sheep
and Mary is Mary)

(30) If Mary owns a sheep then Mary owns an animal.

(Truth-conditionally equivalent to: If Mary owns a
sheep then
Mary is Mary)

Now we use this idea of left redundancy, which echoes the above van
der Sandt analysis of the effect of
fronting presuppositions, to
define the crucial notion in Karttunen’s (1974) account.

Definition 8 (Karttunen/Schlenker: Presupposition via

satisfaction)

A presupposition P is satisfied at point X

in S iff P would be left-redundant if added at point
X. A sentence
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presupposes whatever propositions must hold in

global contexts of utterance such that each locally
triggered
presupposition is satisfied where its trigger occurs.

As an example, let us consider the presuppositions predicted for (27),

repeated below:

(27) Either Geraldine is not a mormon or she has given up wearing her
holy underwear.

Note first that for all sentences of the form “A or

B”, the negation of A is satisfied within the
right disjunct.
So “Geraldine is a mormon” is satisfied in
the right disjunct of (27). And more generally, anything entailed
by a
combination of propositions in the context and the negation of the
left disjunct will be satisfied in the
right disjunct. Now, let us
consider the clause “she has given up wearing her holy
underwear”: we take this to
trigger the presupposition that
Geraldine has had holy underwear that she wore. This presupposition
will be
satisfied provided the global context of utterance, combined
with the negation of the left disjunct, entails that
she has had holy
underwear that she wore. And classically this will be the case if and
only if the context
supports the conditional “if Geraldine is a
mormon, then she has had holy underwear that she wore” (which
would also be the case if the context supported something stronger).
Hence, this conditional is the
presupposition Karttunen (1974)
predicts for (27).

One notable property of Karttunen’s 1974 treatment of examples like

(27), a property not found in his 1973
model, is that the
presupposition predicted is conditionalized. That is, (27) is not
predicted to presuppose that
Geraldine has had holy underwear that she
wore, but that if she is a mormon then she has had such
underwear. We
already encountered such conditionalized presuppositions in our
discussion of Strong Kleene;
in fact, Strong Kleene predicts exactly
the same conditionalized presupposition in this case. Karttunen’s 1974
model also predicts conditionalized presuppositions when the
presupposition trigger is in the right conjunct
of a conjunction, or
in the consequent of a
conditional.[15]
Thus in (16a), repeated below, the presuppositions
predicted are that
there is a king (since presuppositions triggered in the antecedent are
not conditionalized),
and that if the king is angry, then there is a
knave. In (16b), the conditional presupposition (that if there is a
knave, then there is a knave) is trivial, so in effect there is no net
presupposition.[16]

(16a) If the king is angry then the knave stole the tarts.
(16b) If there is a knave, then the knave stole the tarts.

Although Karttunen’s (1974) model is distinct conceptually from any of

its predecessors, we have already
noted that it shares at least some
predictions with Strong Kleene. An observation made by Peters (1979)
showed that the 1974 model is surprisingly closely related to the
semantic accounts of presupposition
discussed above. In particular,
Peters showed that Karttunen’s way of calculating presuppositions for
the
truth conditional connectives is equivalent to what would be
obtained within a three-valued logic, but with
special non-symmetric
connectives. Here is a general way of defining the Peters Connectives,
inspired both
by Schlenker (2009; 2008) and George (2008):

Definition 9 (Middle Kleene/Peters connectives)

Go from left to right through the sentence. For each argument

X that takes a non-classical value, check
whether on the
basis of material on its left, assigning an arbitrary classical value
to X could conceivably
have an effect on the overall value.
If so, the sentence as a whole lacks a classical truth value. If not,
just
assign X an arbitrary value, and carry on. If this
procedure allows all non-classical values to be filled in
classically,
then the sentence can be assigned a classical value.

For example, this procedure makes a conjunction classical if both its

arguments are classical, false if the left
conjunct is false, and
undefined otherwise. Thus undefinedness of the left conjunct forces
undefinedness of
the entire conjunction, whereas undefinedness of the
right conjunct only sometimes yields undefinedness of
the entire
conjunct, as seen in the following comparison of truth tables in
various systems. The net effect is
that presuppositions of the left
conjunct project in the Middle Kleene system, just as in the Weak
Kleene
system, but presuppositions of the right conjunct are
conditionalized, just as in the Strong Kleene system.
This behavior
precisely mirrors that of the Karttunen (1974) model.

Definition 10 (Trivalent truth tables for

conjunction)

Weak Kleene Middle Kleene/Peters Strong Kleene

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φ ∧ ψ t f ✭ φ ∧ ψ t f ✭ φ ∧ ψ t f ✭

t t f ✭ t t f ✭ t t f ✭
f f f ✭ f f f f f f f f
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ f ✭

The equivalence between Peters’ connectives and Karttunen’s model

paved the way for a more complete
reformulation of the Karttunen model
in Karttunen and Peters (1977; 1979), where certain types of
presupposition (which Karttunen and Peters regard as conventional
implicatures rather than presuppositions)
are treated in a
compositional grammar fragment. This fragment uses two dimensions of
meaning, one for
presupposition and one for assertion, and is
effectively an implementation of the Peters connectives in a
four-
valued logic; see Krahmer (1994); Krahmer (1998), Beaver (2001),
and Beaver and Krahmer (2001) for
discussion, and the latter for a
fragment that mirrors that of Karttunen and Peters, but allows for
richer
interactions between presuppositions and
quantifiers.[17]

4.3 Satisfaction theories

Although Karttunen’s (1974) model turned out to be equivalent to a
system which, from a purely technical
point of view, is in the
Frege-Strawson tradition, Karttunen (1974) was one of the seminal
papers of the
dynamic zeitgeist that swept through semantics and
pragmatics in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Also relevant
here are Hamblin (1970), Stalnaker (1972; 1974) , Gazdar (1979) and
Lewis (1979), all of
whom advanced dynamic models of pragmatics in
which the (joint) commitments of speakers and hearers
evolve as new
assertions are made and their content becomes part of the linguistic
context available for
future utterances. It is against this background
that Heim (1982; 1983) offered the first dynamic semantic
account of
presupposition. Heim’s model utilizes Stalnaker’s notion of a context
as a set of all possible
worlds compatible with what has been
established at that point in a conversation, but involves a crucial
twist
adapted from Karttunen. In Stalnaker’s model, a single
global context is updated each time new information
is
asserted, but in Heim’s model the context is updated locally
in the process of computing the meanings of
subparts of a complex
expression.[18]
We can define a simplified version of Heim’s system as follows:

Definition 11 (Dynamic Semantics)

Assuming that the context set C is a set of possible

worlds and S and S′ are sentences:

i. C + S = the subset of worlds in C that

are compatible with S, but this is defined iff
S’s
presuppositions (if any) are true in all worlds in
C.
ii. C + ¬S = C − (C +
S)
iii. C + S ∧ S′ = (C +
S) + S′
iv. C + S ○ S′, where ○
is some truth functional operator, is given by the simplest classical
definition of
○ in terms of ¬ and ∧ that preserves the
order of the two sub-clauses.
v. S is satisfied in a context C iff
C + S = C (i.e., updating C with
S has no effect).
vi. S presupposes S′ iff
S′ is satisfied in all contexts where update with
S is defined.

Clause (iv) entails that update with a conditional is defined

via the equivalence A → B ≡ ¬
(A ∧ ¬ B)
(provided that the subordinate
clause precedes the main clause). To see how this will work, let’s
consider the
following example:

(31) If the king is angry, then the knave stole the tarts. ( =
(16a))

In order to update a context with (31), we must do the

equivalent of updating with (32a). Now clause (ii)
says that
to update a context with (32a), we must first try updating with (32b),
and subtract the result from
the original context (so as to leave
behind whichever worlds are not compatible with (32a)). But
(32b) is a
conjunction, so we must first update with the left conjunct
(32c), and then with the right (32d). Updating
with (32c) is only
defined if the presupposition that there is a king is satisfied in all
worlds in the context set.
We immediately see that (31) and (32a),
(32b), and (32c) all have this requirement, i.e., they presuppose that
there is a king. Provided this presupposition is satisfied, updating
with (32c) produces a subset of worlds
where the king is angry. We use
this reduced context set for update with (32d). But update with (32d)
again
uses the negation clause (ii) of the above definition.
So we started off with a set of worlds where there is a

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king, we
reduced it to a set of worlds where the king is angry, and now we must
update that context with
(32e), an update which will only be defined
if there is a knave.

(32a) It’s not the case that [the king is angry and the knave didn’t
steal the tarts].
(32b) The king is angry and the knave didn’t steal the tarts.
(32c) The king is angry.
(32d) The knave didn’t steal the tarts.
(32e) The knave stole the tarts.

The upshot of the above argumentation is that update of a context with

(31) is only defined for contexts in
which (a) there is a king, and
(b) all the worlds where the king is angry are worlds where there is a
knave.
Following the definitions through, it turns out that, once
again, the original sentence carries both a non-
conditionalized
presupposition, that there is a king, and the conditionalized
presupposition that if the king is
angry, then there is a knave.

The satisfaction based model has seen considerable further

development—see e.g., Beaver (1992; 2001),
Chierchia (1995),
Heim (1992), Zeevat (1992), and, for a rather different formalization
of a dynamic
semantic approach, van Eijck (1993; 1994;
1995).[19]

5. Accommodation
The most important feature of the satisfaction model not covered in
the description above is accommodation.
Accommodation was first
discussed by Karttunen (1974) and Stalnaker (1974), though only named
as such
by Lewis (1979). Karttunen introduces the concept as
follows:

Ordinary conversation does not always proceed in the ideal orderly

fashion described earlier.
People do make leaps and shortcuts by using
sentences whose presuppositions are not satisfied
in the
conversational context. This is the rule rather than the exception
[…] I think we can
maintain that a sentence is always taken to
be an increment to a context that satisfies its
presuppositions. If
the current conversational context does not suffice, the listener is
entitled and
expected to extend it as required. (Karttunen 1974: 191)

If this looks reasonably straightforward, the reader should be warned

that accommodation is among the more
contentious topics in
presupposition theory.
[20]

To begin with, there are various notions of accommodation, some of

which are stricter than others. To
explain, consider the following
example by Heim (1982):

(33) John read a book about Schubert and wrote to the author.

In order to determine the intended meaning of “the

author”, the hearer has to infer (i) that there is an
author
and (ii) that the said author wrote the book read by
John. Whereas on a broad understanding of
accommodation, all of this
is accommodated, on a strict construal only (i) is, and
(ii) is a bridging inference.
This is not just a matter of
terminology. If we choose to be strict, we can argue that there is
something like an
“accommodation module”, which as such
has nothing to do with world knowledge; whereas if the notion is
construed more broadly, accommodation is of a piece with bridging. To
facilitate the following discussion,
we will adopt a strict notion of
accommodation, and take the naive view that what is accommodated is
the
presupposition as triggered by, e.g., a definite NP or factive
verb.

5.1 Global and Local Accommodation

With these preliminaries out of the way, we turn to the first major
question: Where are presuppositions
accommodated? Though it
may seem odd at first, this question is inescapable if we assume, as
is standard in
dynamic semantics, that an expression may occur in
several contexts at the same time (cf. Section 4.3). For
Heim (1982),
following Lewis (1979), accommodation is a process whereby contexts
are adjusted so as to
make update possible when presuppositions are
not satisfied. In terms of her treatment of accommodation,

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Heim’s
major innovation over Lewis was to allow this process to take place
not only in the global context of
utterance, but also on local
contexts found midway through an update. To illustrate, consider the
following:

(34a) (c0) Maybe (c1) Betty is

trying to give up drinking.
(34b) (c0) Maybe (c1) Wilma
thinks that (c2) her husband is having an
affair.

Here c0 refers to the global context in which a

given sentence is uttered, and c1and
c2 are auxiliary, or local,
contexts. In (34a),
the modal “maybe” creates an auxiliary context of possible
states of affairs in which Betty
is trying to give up drinking; the
same, mutatis mutandis, for (34b). The presupposition triggered in
(34a),
that Betty used to drink, can be accommodated
globally, i.e., in c0, or
locally, in c1. In the former case, the
utterance is construed as meaning that Betty used to drink and may be
trying to kick the habit; in the latter, it
conveys that, possibly,
Betty used to drink and is trying to give up drinking. Likewise, in
(34b), the
presupposition that Wilma is married may be accommodated
globally, or locally in the most deeply
embedded context. But here
there is a third option, as well: if the presupposition is
accommodated in c1, the
sentence is read as
“Maybe Wilma is married and she thinks that her husband is
having an affair”, and we
speak of intermediate
accommodation.

It is widely agreed that the following empirical generalization, made

explicit by Heim (1983), is correct:

PGA: Global accommodation is preferred to non-global

accommodation.

While the PGA was initially based solely on intuitions, quantitative

studies on the speed of processing local
and global interpretations
have since provided empirical support for it (e.g. Chemla and Bott
2013 and
Romoli and Schwartz 2014).

In the examples in (34) the PGA (preference for global accommodation)

clearly holds: non-global
interpretations may be possible, but they
require special contexts. One such context may be that the
presupposition contains a variable which is bound by a quantifier:

(35) Most Germans wash their cars on Saturday.

In (35), with the possessive presupposition trigger “their

cars”, there is a global context (outside of the scope
of
“most”), a local context corresponding to the scope of the
quantifier (occupied by the VP “wash their cars
on
Saturday”), and also an intermediate context in the restrictor
of the quantifier (occupied by “Germans”).
The most
natural interpretation of this sentence surely is that most Germans
who own a car wash it on
Saturday. So in this case intermediate
accommodation seems to be the preferred option, and this might be
explained, following van der Sandt (1992), by supposing that the
possessive pronoun contains a variable
bound by the quantifier.

There are other cases where intermediate accommodation is virtually

impossible:

(36) (c0) If (c1) Fred is

coming to the reception, (c2) he may
(c3) bring his wife.

It is quite unlikely that this may be construed, with intermediate

accommodation in c1, which is the
antecedent of
the conditional, as “If Fred is married and is coming to the
reception, he may bring his wife.”
More generally, we don’t know
of any clear-cut cases (i.e., cases in which accommodation is not
forced by
independent contextual factors) in which a presupposition
triggered in the consequent of a conditional is
accommodated in the
antecedent.

The picture is rather confusing. While in some cases, e.g., (34b) or

(35), intermediate accommodation seems
possible and sometimes even
preferred, in other cases it doesn’t seem possible at all. And things
get even
more confused than this. Thus far, we have taken our examples
at face value, but some authors have argued
that we shouldn’t because,
as a matter of fact, intermediate accommodation doesn’t exist. For
instance,
according to Beaver (2001), the presupposition in (35) is
taken as evidence that the topic of conversation is
car-owning
Germans, and it is this topic that restricts the domain of the
quantifier, making intermediate
accommodation redundant. See also von
Fintel (1995) and Geurts and van der Sandt (1999) for discussion.

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Returning to the uncontested PGA, let us ask how it can be explained.

Heim (1982) was not explicit about
exactly how accommodation should
work and what should be accommodated. And oddly enough, although
virtually all theories of presupposition projection accept that the
PGA holds, there haven’t been that many
attempts at explanation. One
candidate is what Beaver (2001) calls the “Atlas
Principle”, after Atlas (1976):

AP: One accommodation alternative is preferred to

another if the former yields a stronger meaning than
the latter (i.e.,
if the first meaning unilaterally entails the second).

Advocates of the Atlas Principle include, besides its eponym, Yeom

(1998), Zeevat (1999), and Blutner
(2000). One thing to note about the
Atlas Principle is that it does not necessarily vindicate the PGA
across
the board: while the predictions made by the Atlas Principle
will tend to comply with the PGA, they don’t
have to. However, it is
surprisingly difficult to say where exactly the Atlas Principle
deviates from the PGA,
because this depends on various extraneous
factors; see Geurts (2000) for discussion.

A major worry about the Atlas Principle is that it is ad hoc.

Despite its soothing resemblance to Grice’s
second Quantity Maxim, it
is questionable whether hearers generally prefer stronger
interpretations to
weaker ones. This suggests that the Atlas Principle
may not be justified as an instance of a more general
constraint, and
is therefore stipulative. The sad and somewhat embarrassing truth
seems to be that, thus far,
we don’t really know why the PGA should
hold.

One last issue we would like to mention is that accommodation isn’t

always equally easy (or hard). For
example:

(37a) Fred is looking for the person.

(37b) Wilma is pregnant, too.

In (37a) the presupposition triggered by “the person”

clearly requires a salient discourse referent to hook on
to; the
sentence would be infelicitous when uttered out of the blue. The same
goes for the presupposition
triggered by “too” in (37b),
viz. that some salient person different from Wilma is pregnant. This
sentence
would be very peculiar when uttered out of the blue, or in
any context where no salient person was under
discussion who could be
pregnant. Put otherwise: unlike the presuppositions we have seen thus
far, it is very
hard to deal with the presuppositions of “the
person” or “too” by accommodation
alone.[21]
Why should this
be so?

Van der Sandt (1992) proposes that presuppositions whose descriptive

content is relatively poor are hard to
accommodate. This
generalization is borne out by pronouns, names, and semantically
attenuate definite NPs
like “the person”. However, it is
not very clear what “relatively poor” means. Definite NPs
like “the water
molecule” or “the lonely
carpenter” don’t strike us as particularly poor, but may be hard
to interpret by way
of accommodation. Similarly, the presuppositions
associated with “too” may be quite rich, and nevertheless
they are generally hard to accommodate. Geurts and van der Sandt
(2004) propose to account for the latter by
adopting Heim’s (1992)
idea that the presupposition triggered by “too” contains a
pronominal element,
which blocks accommodation, but this proposal has
been criticised by Beaver and Zeevat (2007). Be this as
it may, it
seems clear that van der Sandt’s generalization cannot be read as
biconditional: even if poor
presuppositions are difficult to
accommodate, the reverse doesn’t always hold.

Another problem with van der Sandt’s generalization is that it is not

clear how it can be justified. Even if it
somehow makes sense that
lack of descriptive content should make accommodation hard, we would
like to
know more precisely why this should be so. A possible answer
to this question may be found in the work on
definites by Hawkins
(1978), Clark and Marshall (1981), Heim (1982), and others. As Heim
observes,
“accommodation in response to definites is not
normally a matter of adding just the minimal amount of
information
that would restore felicity.” (Heim 1982, p. 372) It seems
plausible that this holds for
accommodation generally, and it arguably
follows from the nature of accommodation. If a presupposition is
to be
interpreted by way of accommodation, new information is presented
as if it were given, and it has often
been observed that this
will only work if the information is not contentious or otherwise
remarkable. That is
to say, it should always be possible to
integrate the new information into the common ground: it has
to be
linked to what is already given. This will be hard with
semantically attenuate NPs like “the thing” or
pronouns
like “he”, but also with richer definites whose content
cannot readily be linked to anything in the

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common ground.
Nevertheless, it will generally be easy with richer presuppositions,
not because they have
more content, but simply because they
are more likely to contain anchors into the common ground.

5.2 Accommodating Presuppositions in Satisfaction Framework

Local satisfaction is at the heart of dynamic theories of
presupposition, but we’ve already seen that it faces
some empirical
challenges in accounting for conditionalized presuppositions.
Specifically, sometimes
satisfaction theories generate weaker
conditional presuppositions when intuitively the speaker is
presupposing a stronger, unconditionalized presupposition. Geurts
(1996,1999a) deems this "The Proviso
Problem," and the data
surrounding this problem has left quite a mess for proponents of
satisfaction theories
to clean
up.[22]

According to satisfaction theories, only weak conditional

presuppositions should follow from embedding
presuppositions in
certain constructions, notably conditionals themselves. For example,
imagine that you are
about to go surfing for the first time in the
cold waters of Northern California, and you and your interlocutor
suspect that a common acquaintance, Theo, is a scuba diver, and that
he may be able to help. In this context,
the use of his in
(38a) intuitively leads to the conditional inference in (38c):

(38a) If Theo is a scuba diver, then he will bring his wet suit.
(38b) Theo has a wet suit.
(38c) If Theo is a scuba diver, then he has a wet suit.

Contrast this with (39a), which strongly suggests that the speaker
believes that Theo has a wet suit (39b), and
not the weaker
conditional in (39c):

(39a) If Theo is in a generous mood, then he will bring his wet suit.
(39b) Theo has a wet suit
(39c) If Theo is in a generous mood, then he has a wet suit.

Whatever mechanism is used to determine what is accommodated, it must

ensure that sometimes conditional
presuppositions are strengthened (to
become unconditionalized), and sometimes they aren’t. What examples
like (38) and (39) suggest is that this might be explained in terms of
plausibility: it could be that the
conditional in (39c) is
strengthened because it seems implausible that a speaker would be
assuming that
Theo’s generosity was linked to his ownership of aquatic
paraphernalia, whereas it seems more plausible that
a speaker would
simply be assuming that Theo owned such equipment.

Several proposals (e.g. Beaver 2001, Singh 2007, 2009; Schlenker 2011)
try to motivate this kind of
strengthening mechanism to explain
when exactly a conditionalized presupposition should be
strengthened.
For example, Beaver’s model of accommodation, first
published in Beaver (1992) treats accommodation as a
type of filtering
operation. Beaver suggests that due to uncertainty about what the
speaker takes the common
ground to be, the hearer has to entertain
multiple alternative context sets, with some ranking of which is the
most plausible. All these alternative contexts are updated
simultaneously. Accommodation is then what
happens when the update is
not defined on what was previously considered to be the most plausible
context,
in which case the hearer drops that context from contention.
What remains is a new set of contexts in which
the most plausible one
is a context that has been successfully updated.

Unfortunately for this style of explanation of presupposition

strengthening, plausibility appears to have its
limits. Consider the
two examples in (40a,b). If we assume that a cleft "it is X
that Y-ed" presupposes an
existential, roughly
"someone/something Y-ed" then in a dynamic theory of
presupposition (40b) will
generate the same conditionalized
presupposition as results from (40a), which involves the factive
"knows",
namely the conditional in (40c). However, there is a clear
difference in the inferences we would tend to draw
from utterances of
(40a) and (40b). Whereas (40a) licenses an inference only to the
conditional
presupposition in (40c), example (40b) leads to the
stronger, unconditionalized presupposition in (40d).
Under the
assumptions we have made, namely that (40a) and (40b) generate exactly
the same underlying
conditionalized presupposition, the plausibility
approach used in Beaver’s framework fails to predict a
difference in
what is accommodated in these cases.

(40a) Peter knows that if the problem was easy, someone solved it.
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(40b) If the problem was easy then it was Kristie who solved it.
(40c) If the problem was easy, someone solved it.

[Conditional presupposition for (40a,b), accommodated for (40a)]

(40d) Someone solved the problem.

[Unconditionalized presupposition, accommodated for (40b) but not

(40a)]

One relevant factor here that might influence accomodation is

information structure. In (40b), the cleft
structure might be said to
reflect the presence of a Question Under Discussion (QUD), in
the sense of
Roberts (2012), concerning who solved the problem. To the
extent that such a question is under discussion,
the interlocutors
will presumably know that this is so. And if "Who solved the problem?"
is indeed the
question the interlocutors are trying to answer, then
they are likely to mutually accept that someone solved
the problem,
thus explaining projection. Crucially, this line of reasoning depends
on the cleft in (40b) having
a particular information structural
function, and a similar argument could not be made in a case like
(39a),
where there is no constructional marking of information
structure, and in particular no indicator that "Who
solved the
problem?" is the QUD.

(41a) If the problem was easy then Peter knows that someone solved it.
(41b) If the problem was easy then Peter KNOWS that someone solved it.
(41c) If the problem was easy then even PETER knows that someone solved it.

We may have reasonable motivations for when we might expect a

conditional presupposition to be
strengthened. But even with such
mechanisms, satisfaction theories still fall short when confronting
certain
data. For example, consider (42) below.

(42) If when Sam gets back from vacation he finds moldy fruit in the
kitchen, he’ll be annoyed that he had
food in the house.

Here, the consequent presupposes that Sam had food in the house, which
is also entailed by the antecedent.
Since satisfaction theories assume
that presuppositions in a complex sentence will be satisfied locally,
we’re
left with a tautology. So, the local satisfaction constraint
generates presuppositions which are redundant.

The proviso problem is still a relevant hurdle for proponents of

modern satisfaction theories. Mandelkern
(2016) presents a version of
satisfaction theory designed to avoid the proviso problem entirely.
Romoli et al
(2011) explore this issue experimentally by asking which
presupposition -the conditional or unconditional
option- is more
basic. But, ultimately the proviso problem is less problematic for
other accounts of
presupposition, which don’t rely on local context
updates.

5.3 Resolving and Accommodating Presuppositions in DRT

In order to account for both presupposition projection facts and the
parallels between presupposition and
anaphora, van der Sandt proposed
an accommodation-based model as an extension of Discourse
Representation Theory (see the SEP entry on
discourse representation theory
for an introduction).
Presupposed information is information that is
presented as given, and in van der Sandt’s theory this means
that
presuppositions want to have discourse referents to bind to. However,
whereas anaphoric pronouns are
rarely interpretable in the absence of
a suitable antecedent, the same does not hold for all
presupposition-
inducing expressions. For instance, a speaker may
felicitously assert that he met “Fred’s sister” even if he
knows full well that his audience isn’t aware that Fred has a sister.
In such cases, presuppositions are
generally accommodated, which is to
say that the hearer accepts the information as given, and revises his
representation of the context accordingly. Accommodation, thus
understood, is a form of exploitation in
Grice’s sense: the purpose of
presuppositional expressions is to signal that this or that
information is given,
and if some information is new but not
particularly interesting or controversial (like the fact that somebody
has a sister) the speaker may choose to “get it out of the
way” by presuppositional means.

Van der Sandt’s theory incorporates the notion of accommodation as

follows. Presuppositions, according van
der Sandt, introduce
information that prefers to be linked to discourse referents that are
already available in
the hearer’s representation of the discourse, and
in this respect they are like pronouns. Van der Sandt in fact
uses the
term "binding" to refer to configurations in which presuppositions
have antecedents in the Discourse
Representation Structure (DRS), thus
generalizing the standard notion of a bound pronoun to cases involving
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multiple discourse referents. However, if a suitable discourse

antecedent is not available, a new one will be
accommodated, and the
presupposition is linked to that. Generally speaking, accommodation is
not an option
in the interpretation of pronouns, and one reason that
has been suggested for this is that a pronoun’s
descriptive content is
relatively poor (see Section 5.1 for discussion). Being told that
“she” is wonderful is
not particularly helpful if it isn’t
clear who the pronoun is meant to refer to. By contrast, if the
speaker refers
to “Pedro’s sister” there is more to go on,
and accommodation becomes feasible. Hence, van der Sandt
hypothesizes
that pronouns are a special class of presuppositional expressions:
while all presupposition
triggers prefer to be linked to antecedents,
pronouns almost always must be linked to antecedents because
they are
descriptively attenuated, and therefore cannot be construed by way of
accommodation.

To get a better idea how this is supposed to work, let us consider an

example with several presupposition
triggers:

(43) If Fred is protesting, then his son is protesting, too.

This sentence contains the definite NP “his son”, which in

its turn contains the pronoun “his”, and the focus
particle “too”. Assuming the pronoun’s antecedent is
“Fred”, the definite NP triggers the presupposition that
Fred has a son, while the focus particle triggers the presupposition
that someone other than Fred’s son is
protesting. Note that in this
example the presupposition triggered by the definite NP is
“inherited” by the
sentence as a whole, while the one
triggered by “too” is not: normally speaking, an utterance
of (43) would
license the inference that (according to the speaker)
Fred has a son, but not that someone else besides Fred’s
son is
protesting.

Van der Sandt’s theory accounts for these observations as follows. We

suppose that the grammar assigns (43)
the intermediate semantic
representation in (44a). Here [ u1,…, um:
φ1,…,φn] is a simple
Discourse
Representation Structure in linear form, with u1,…,
um a list of discourse markers, and
φ1,…,φn a list of
conditions on those markers; connectives like ⇒ are used to build
up complex conditions. We assume for
convenience that most
interpretative problems have been cleared out of the way already, and
that the only
thing that remains to be done is resolve the
presuppositions triggered by “his”, “his son”
and “too”, which
are flagged by Beaver’s (1992) trigger
symbol, ∂.

(44a) [x: Fred(x), [: protesting(x)] ⇒ [: ∂[z: ∂[y:], z

is y’s son], protesting (z), ∂[u: u ≠ z, protesting(u)]]]

…binding y to x…
(44b) [x: Fred(x), [: protesting(x)] ⇒ [: ∂[z: z is x’s
son], protesting(z), ∂[u: u ≠ z, protesting(u)]]]

…accommodating x…
(44c) [x, z: Fred(x), z is x’s son, [: protesting(x)] ⇒ [:
protesting(z), ∂[u: u ≠ z, protesting(u)]]]

…binding u to x…
(44d) [x, z: Fred(x), z is x’s son, [: protesting(x)] ⇒ [:
protesting(z), x ≠ z]]

(44a) is the initial semantic representation associated with (43), in

which three presuppositions remain to be
resolved. The first of these,
triggered by the pronoun “his”, is bound to the discourse
referent representing
Fred, which results in (44b). The second
presupposition, that Fred has a son, cannot be bound, and therefore
must be interpreted by way of accommodation. Van der Sandt’s theory,
like Heim’s (Heim, 1983), stipulates
that accommodation at the global
level, as shown in (44c), is preferred to accommodation at other
sites.
Finally, the presupposition triggered by the focus particle can
be bound in the antecedent of the conditional;
after simplification,
this results in (44d), which represents the most natural way of
interpreting (43).

6. Born to fail, or unborn?

What happens when a presupposition is false? The textbook
proto-history of answers to this question goes as
follows. According
to Frege (1892), if an expression A suffers from
presupposition failure, then any sentence
containing A will
lack a truth value; Russell (1905) famously denied this, holding that
such a sentence will
always be true or false; and then Strawson (1950)
reaffirmed Frege’s position, more or less. What is less well
known, at
least insofar as it usually doesn’t make it into introductory classes
on philosophy of language, is
that in subsequent work, Strawson partly
recanted his initial view and came to doubt that presupposition
failure invariably entails lack of truth value.

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Taking a closer look at how speakers actually assess a sentence,

Strawson’s (1964) paper argues that
presupposition failure may but
need not cause a sentence to be infelicitous. Two of his examples are
the
following:

(45a) Jones spent the morning at the local swimming pool.

(45b) The exhibition was visited yesterday by the king of France.

If there is no swimming pool locally, it is “natural

enough”, according to Strawson, to say that (45a) is false,
and
since the king of France doesn’t exist, the same applies to (45b). And
if these sentences are false, their
negations must be true. So, if
these subtle judgments are accepted, there are cases in which
presupposition
failure does not prevent us from saying that a sentence
is true or false. But Strawson hasn’t changed his mind
about Russell’s
example:

Confronted with the classical example, “The king of France is

bald”, we may well feel it natural
to say, straight off, that
the question whether the statement is true or false doesn’t arise
because
there is no king of France. (Strawson 1964: 90)

Strawson goes on to observe, however, that speakers who subscribe to

this judgment may want to reconsider
their verdict if the context is
set up the right way. For instance, if Russell’s sentence is used to
answer the
question, “What examples, if any, are there of famous
contemporary figures who are bald?”, we may be more
inclined to
say that the answer is simply false.

Strawson’s explanation for these facts is given in terms of

topicality. The most likely purpose of a sentence
like (45a) is to
describe what Jones has been doing in the morning, rather than, say,
who the local swimming
pool was visited by. That is, in the absence of
further information about the context in which this sentence is
uttered, its topic will be Jones’s exploits. Similarly, a sentence
like (45b) will normally be used to convey
information about the
exhibition. If so, although the sentence purports to refer to the king
of France, it is not
about him; the king of France is not the topic of
discourse, nor part of the topic. In other words, the existence
of the
king of France is not at-issue. Strawson’s suggestion is that
this circumstance influences the way
presupposition failure is dealt
with. On this view, presupposition failure results in infelicity only
if it affects
the topic of a sentence; otherwise the sentence will be
judged true or false, as appropriate.

One of the appealing features of this analysis is that it takes into

account the context-dependence of speakers’
intuitions. As Strawson
notes, Russell’s sentence (46) will by default be construed as being
about the king of
France, whence a strong tendency to judge the
sentence infelicitous.

(46) The king of France is bald.

If, however, the discourse is about royal baldness in general, for

instance, the grammatical subject of (46) is
used to say something
about that topic, and Strawson’s account predicts that the sentence is
more likely to be
judged false, which seems correct. Another
observation that neatly falls into place is that word order may
have
an effect on speakers’ intuitions about presupposition failure. As
Strawson observes, if we compare
(45b) with (47), where the defective
description is in subject position, we would be “a shade more
squeamish” to say that the sentence is simply false (p. 91).
This is precisely what one should expect if
speakers’ intuitions were
topic-dependent.

(47) The king of France visited the exhibition yesterday.

Assuming that Strawson’s observations are correct, should we say (a)

that non-topical definites are non-
presuppositional, or (b) that they
do have presuppositions, whose failure happens not to affect speakers’
truth-value judgments? Some authors argue for the former (e.g.,
Reinhart 1982, Horn 1989); this is
Strawson’s view, as well. Von
Fintel (2004) argues for the latter: topical or non-topical,
“the king of France”
always triggers the presupposition
that there is a king of France; it’s just our truth-value judgments
that
fluctuate.

Von Fintel’s position is in line with what has been a working

hypothesis for many years in theories of
projection. According to
these theories, presuppositions are never really cancelled: if a
presupposition seems
to disappear, it is because it projects to a
non-global context. It bears emphasizing that this view is not
irrevocably linked to these theories. It’s just that there is no need
to assume that there are part-time
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presupposition triggers (in a sense

we expand upon in Section 8 below), because non-global projection can
be relied upon to explain why presuppositions sometimes seem to
disappear. However, this working
hypothesis may have to be reassessed
if we want to account for Strawson’s observations, which might be
taken to show that presuppositions are cancellable not only in complex
sentences but in simple sentences, as
well.

So far we’ve only talked about definite descriptions. Some other

triggers show similar variability, but not all
of them do. On the one
hand, the domain presuppositions associated with strong quantifiers
like “all” and
“most” behave very much like
definite presuppositions (de Jong and Verkuyl 1985, Lappin and
Reinhart
1988, Geurts 2007). For example, when uttered out of the
blue, (48) will sound odd, but when proffered in
response to
Strawson’s question, “What examples, if any, are there of famous
contemporary figures who are
bald?”, it seems more likely to be
judged false:

(48) All South-American monarchs are bald.

On the other hand, consider the following:

(49a) #BENEDICT XVI is the incumbent pope, too.

(49b) #Carnap managed to be born on May 18, 1891.

Given that there is only one incumbent pope and that it can’t have
taken Carnap any effort to be born on May
18, 1891, both (49a) and
(49b) suffer from presupposition failure. But if someone who knew that
there was
only one incumbent pope uttered (49a), it would not seem
entirely natural to say that they had lied. One
might even say that
these sentences are true, and this intuition does not seem to
be topic dependent. The
reason for this may be that the
presuppositions in question are incidental to the primary
content of these
sentences.

7. Presuppositions and attitudes

For nearly four decades, the Holy Grail of presupposition research has
been to explain the behavior of
presuppositional expressions occurring
in embedded positions. A particularly challenging mode of
embedding
arises with attitude verbs. If we embed a presupposition trigger
under, e.g., “believe”, we observe
two types of inference.
This is seen in the following examples, where “→”
indicates that there is an
inference, but of unspecified type:

(50) Barney believes that his sister is drunk.

→ Barney has a sister.

→ Barney believes he has a sister.

(51) Wilma believes that Barney knows that his sister is
drunk.

→ Barney’s sister is drunk.

→ Wilma believes that Barney’s sister is drunk.

Both inferences are fairly robust, and both seem to exhibit projection
behavior, as we illustrate here by
applying various embedding tests to
(50):

(52a) Barney doesn’t believe that his sister is drunk.

(52b) Perhaps Barney believes that his sister is drunk.

(52c) If Barney has a sister, then he believes that his sister is

drunk.
(52d) If Barney believes that he has a sister, then he also believes
that his sister is drunk.

It is natural to infer from both (52a) and (52b) that Barney has a
sister and that he believes that he has a
sister, and these inferences
can be blocked in sentences such as those in (52c) and (52d) , where
“his sister”
occurs in the consequent of a conditional
whose antecedent makes one or the other inference explicit. It may
seem odd at first that (52c) should block the inference that Barney
believes that he has a sister, while (52d)
blocks the inference that
Barney has a sister. Note however that, generally speaking, Barney has
a sister iff he
believes that he has a sister. We’ll return
to this theme below.

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Interestingly, literally the same pattern of observations holds for

other attitude verbs, like “want” for
example:

(53) Barney wants to phone his sister.

→ Barney has a sister.

→ Barney believes he has a sister.

The puzzling thing is that (53) does not license the inference that
Barney wants to have a sister, but rather
that he believes
that he has one.

So, in many cases at least, a presupposition φ triggered within

the scope of “x
VA…”, where
VA is an attitude
verb, gives rise to two
inferences with a candidature for presuppositional status: (a) that
φ and (b) that x
believes φ. Hence, we have three
possible ways of proceeding, all of which have been defended in the
literature:

i. Both inferences are presuppositions (Zeevat 1992, at least for

certain triggers).
ii. Only φ is a presupposition (Gazdar 1979a; van der Sandt 1988;
Geurts 1998).
iii. Only “x believes that φ” is a
presupposition (Karttunen 1974; Heim 1992).

The first strategy seems to require a stipulation that certain

presuppositions have to be accommodated twice,
once inside a belief
context, and once outside, and such a strategy is difficult to
motivate. On the other hand,
for (ii) and (iii),
there is the obvious problem that if we adopt either one of them, we
only account for half of
the observed inferences. How to explain the
other half? Three possible answers to this question have been
discussed in the literature, mainly by Heim (1992):

i. De re construal (Heim 1992) What at first looks like a

presupposition projecting to the global context
may in fact be due to
a de re construal of the presupposition trigger. This
solution has several serious
drawbacks. In particular, it’s hard to
see how this proposal can give us both inferences at the same
time,
rather than one (de re) or the other (presupposition). For
this and other reasons (see Geurts 1998),
we will not consider it any
further.
ii. Exportation (Karttunen 1974, Heim 1992, Kay 1992) If
Barney believes that he has a sister, then it
may plausibly be
inferred that he has a sister. Therefore, if it is presupposed that
Barney believes that
he has a sister, then it may plausibly be
inferred that he has a sister.
iii. Importation (Heim 1992, Geurts 1998) If Barney has a
sister, then it may plausibly be inferred that he
believes that he has
a sister. Therefore, if it is presupposed that Barney has a sister,
then it may
plausibly be inferred that he believes that he has a
sister.

If our presupposition theory predicts that the inferences projected

from “x VA” are of
the form “x believes
that φ”, then we can
appeal to exportation to explain why φ is inferable, as well.
Vice versa, a theory which
predicts that φ is presupposed
can use importation for deriving “x believes that
φ”. So we have two options:

  x believes that φ φ
Option A importation presupposition
Option B presupposition exportation

Which is it going to be? That’s a hard question, which raises various

issues, only some of which we can
mention here. First, it should be
noted that, whereas for theories of the satisfaction family it is hard
to avoid
making the prediction that presuppositions projected
from attitude contexts are of the form “x believes that
φ”, DRT-style theories are more flexible, and can predict
either this or that the presupposition is simply φ. In
other
words, satisfaction theories are more constrained (which is good), but
therefore practically forced to
resort to Option B.

One of the issues that need to be addressed is that of the true nature
of importation and exportation
inferences. It seems reasonable to
assume that, generally speaking, people’s beliefs are consistent with
the
facts, and that we tend to assume by default that this is the
case. But even if this much is true, it is most
unlikely that, by
default, people will infer φ from “x believes
φ” (for arbitrary x and φ), or vice versa.
Whatever importation and exportation are, they aren’t general
heuristics; rather, these inferences are almost
certainly dependent on
the context to some degree.
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8. Presupposition variability
Much contemporary work on presupposition has been devoted to case
studies of particular triggers or
families of triggers. More often
than not, these studies end up granting some sort of special
consideration to
the trigger(s) in question. We have already seen
instances of trigger differentiation above; for example,
anaphoric accounts identify a class of triggers whose content is
"descriptively poor" to explain why their
presuppositions are more
difficult to accommodate than those of other triggers (see Sections
5.1 & 5.3).
Researchers have noted more and more ways in which the
presuppositions of triggers differ, mostly focused
around questions of
how robustly the presupposition projects and in what sorts of contexts
the presupposition
disappears.

For some, the blurry boundaries between the sorts of inferences that
are covered by presupposition theories
have opened up the door for new
triggers and presupposition-like things that might not be covered by
traditional labels. For example, Schlenker (2015, 2018) applies a
presuppositional framework to iconic co-
speech gestures, to identify
what he calls "cosuppositions." There are also inferences that seem to
challenge
traditional diagnostics like projection. For instance,
non-restrictive relative clauses ("Fred, who I like, ...")
produce
projection like presuppositions, but typically introduce new
information to the discourse (Chierchia
& McConnell-Ginet
1990).

Finally, the way that some theories model presuppositions can give
rise to new types of related inferences.
For example, Chemla (2008)
notes that the sentence in (54a) strongly suggests that the speaker
does not have
a sister. According to Heim (1991), this inference
arises from the fact that the speaker did not utter the
alternative in
(54b), which strongly presupposes that the speaker does have a sister.
This prediction follows
from Heim’s Maximize Presupposition!
principle, that a speaker will use the felicitous sentence with the
strongest presupposition among a set of alternatives. These types of
inferences have been referred to in the
literature as
’anti-presuppositions,’ a term originating with Percus (2006).

(54a) John believes I have a sister.

(54b) John knows I have a sister.

One observed difference between some triggers is that they don’t seem
to reliably generate presuppositions
in certain contexts. As we
mentioned in Section 6, theories of presupposition projection tend to
adopt the
working hypothesis that presuppositions are associated with
expression types: if an expression α triggers a
presupposition
φ, then φ will always be triggered by α. This is just a
matter of economy: since a projection
theory already provides a
mechanism for explaining how presuppositions, once triggered, can seem
to
disappear, there is no need for supposing that there are part-time
presupposition triggers. Indeed, it would be
a bit of a nuisance if it
turned out that that some expressions or constructions trigger their
presuppositions on
a part-time basis, because then we would have two
ways of explaining why a given presupposition fails to
appear: echoing
our discussion in section 6, either it has been canceled (say through
being resolved in an
embedded context) or it wasn’t triggered in the
first place.

Are there compelling reasons for believing that there are part-time
triggers? Not as far as we know. There are
suggestive facts, though.
In the following example from Fauconnier (1985), A and
B are sitting in a bar
observing a stranger who doesn’t seem
to be too happy:

(55) A: I wonder why that guy is looking so glum.

B: Maybe his girlfriend jilted him.

The most natural interpretation of B’s answer, in this

context, is that it is possible that the stranger has a
girlfriend who
has jilted him; this construal will require local accommodation of the
girlfriend if we assume
that “his girlfriend” always
triggers the presupposition that the pronoun’s referent has a
girlfriend.[23]
The
problem is that if this is local accommodation, then it’s too
easy. Local accommodation is supposed to be
dispreferred. If
we allow that in this case the presupposition is locally accommodated,
why can’t all
embedded presuppositions just be locally accommodated
away and not project? Allowing local
accommodation to occur without
constraint would potentially destroy any claim to have explained the
observation that has defined the phenomenon of presupposition since
its inception, the observation that
presuppositions tend to
project.

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If we could explain why this or that expression triggers such

and such a presupposition, one of the corollaries
might be that the
expression in question is a part-time trigger. To see how such an
argument might run in
outline, consider the presuppositions associated
with aspectual verbs like “start” or
“stop”:

(56a) Jill has started smoking pot.

→ Jill didn’t use to smoke pot.

(56b) Jill has stopped smoking pot.

→ Jill used to smoke pot.

Aspectual verbs describe a transition from one state to another, and

it is always the first state that is
presupposed, as standard
projection tests confirm. An explanation might be sought in the idea
that
interlocutors are more interested in where the story is going
than where it came from, and therefore tend to
take the past as given.
A purely pragmatic analysis might involve the hearer reasoning that
since the speaker
is likely to intend to provide the information that
is of greatest interest, they are probably assuming a context
in which
the pre-state associated with a telic sentence is already in the
common ground, i.e. presupposed. It
might further be argued that such
reasoning only applies when the hearer has reason to think that the
speaker
has expertise on the situation being described. A part-time
trigger analysis might be based on the idea that
the regularity with
which pre-states of telic sentences are in the common ground has led
to this pragmatic
reasoning being conventionalized. A part-time
trigger analysis might involve a special triggering condition,
e.g.
involving the speaker’s expertise. So the part-time trigger analysis
might amount to the claim that when
the context determines that the
speaker has expertise about an event, the pre-state is presupposed,
but when
the context determines that the speaker lacks expertise,
there is no such presupposition.

The disappearance of a pre-state presupposition in example (57) could

be explained in this way. On a more
standard view, the aspectual verb
triggers a quantified presupposition, roughly that x used to
smoke. This has
to be accommodated locally, perhaps because as
suggested by van der Sandt (1992), bound presuppositions
can never be
accommodated outside of the scope of the binder, what he calls
trapping. But it is also
conceivable that there is no
presupposition to be trapped. The idea would be that the speaker lacks
expertise
on the habits of the arbitrary individuals quantified over
by the quantifier "anyone", and that this is just the
situation in
which a presupposition is not triggered. The ease with which the
existence presupposition of the
possessive in example (55) disappears
could be explained along the same lines.

(57) If anyone stops smoking before July 1, they are eligible for a
payment from the Tobacco Indemnity
Fund. (Example adapted from
Abusch 2002.)

A different perspective has emerged in recent years to explain the why

certain triggers seem to only result in
a presupposition part of the
time. Rather than proposing that there is variation in triggering,
some linguists
interpret this behavior as the result of variation in
the inherent cancellability among triggers. Abusch (2002,
2010)
distinguishes between ‘soft’ triggers which are weak and
context-dependent and ‘hard’ triggers, which
are resistent to
cancellation. For example, she classifies the achievement verb
win, in (58a), as a soft trigger,
since the presupposition
that John participated in the race is contextually defeasible, whereas
the cleft
construction in (58b) is considered a hard trigger because
it cannot be cancelled by the speaker by explicitly
expressing
ignorance.

(58a) I have no idea whether John ended up participating in the Road

Race yesterday. But if he won it, then
he has more victories than
anyone else in history.
(58b) ??I have no idea whether anyone read that letter. But if it is
John who read it, let’s ask him to be
discreet about the content.

Abusch’s soft/hard distinction suggests that degrees of cancellability

are intrinsic properties of the triggers
themselves, and those that
buy into this theory must motivate why that is. For Abusch,
hard presuppositions
are strictly semantic, whereas soft
presuppositions arise from alternative sets generated in the context.
Romoli (2011, 2014) takes this a step further by arguing that
presuppositions from soft triggers aren’t
presuppositions at all, but
rather entailments or scalar implicatures. In contrast, Abrusán
(2011a, 2011b,
2016) argues that the difference between soft and hard
triggers emerges from how both types interact with
the context, for
example with regard to their focus sensitivity.

Despite the arguments made for a distinction between soft and hard
triggers, empirical studies have
challenged the view that triggers
differ in their conventional properties. Jayez et al (2014)
find that projection
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differences between different triggers

depend more on context than on the classification of the trigger
itself.
Schwarz (2014) compares processing times between hard and soft
triggers and finds that there is no
difference between the two.

With the rise of arguments for more fine-grained variability among

presuppositions, inferences that we may
have confidently called
’presuppositions’ have become harder to think of as forming a natural
class. For
some, the inconsistency in trigger behavior has fed into
something of a presupposition identity crisis, a crisis
dating at
least as far back as Böer and Lycan’s (1976) description of
semantic presupposition as a "myth".
Karttunen (2016) reflects on the
state of the field with an air of regret, saying that the "veritable
zoo" of
triggers that were lumped into the same presuppositional cage
should never have been considered the same
species in the first place.
Ultimately, in order to either salvage a unified notion of
presupposition, or else
argue in a grand tradition (following e.g.
Böer and Lycan 1976 or Karttunen and Peters 1977) for rejecting
the possibility of a unified notion of presupposition, it has become
pressing for linguists to understand how
triggers and their inferences
vary and why, fueling a trend in recent years towards systematic
empirical work,
looking for evidence of cross-linguistic variation,
and developing methods for experimentally testing the
predictions of
different theories.

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Strawson, Peter Frederick

Acknowledgments
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The authors would like to thank Leah Velleman for initially converting
the article to html, and the editorial
team at SEP for extensive help
and advice with both content and form. Beaver’s work was supported by
NSF
award 0952862 Semantics and Pragmatics of Projective Meaning
across Languages, by NSF award 0904913
Modeling Discourse and
Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes, by BAA DCHC-BAA-000101
Tracking
Secretive Behavior through Word Use, and by the NYCT
TeXIT project.

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