A New Predictive Theory of Presupposition Projection

Presupposition Projection: the New Debate

A powerful intuition behind much recent research is that a presupposition must be satisfied in its context of evaluation. The relevant notion of context is, in Stalnaker’s terminology (Stalnaker 1978), the ‘context set’, which encodes what the speech act participants take for granted (we will say ‘context’ for short). But the simplest version of this analysis faces immediate difficulties with c...

Transparency : An Incremental Theory of Presupposition Projection

We sketch a theory in which presuppositions do not directly impose conditions on the context set, but rather on the contextual meaning of a sentence. Specifically, a part of an expression's meaning which is marked as presupposed should satisfy a principle of Transparency, according to which this part can be disregarded without affecting the contextual meaning of the sentence. We argue that if T...

Experimental Work in Presupposition and Presupposition Projection

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

Transparency ( An Incremental Theory of Presupposition Projection ) 1

The analysis of presupposition projection lead researchers to posit in the early 1980's that the meaning of a clause should be viewed as its Context Change Potential rather than as its truth conditions (Heim 1983, following Stalnaker 1974). We argue that this 'dynamic turn' was misguided, and that it leads straight into a dilemma: either one follows Stalnaker in his pragmatic analysis, in which...

PRESUPPOSITION PROJECTION asPROOF