Presupposition Projection and the Interpretation of 'which'-­Questions

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...

The Epistemics of Presupposition Projection

Pragmatic accounts of presupposition projection go back to work of Karttunen and Stalnaker, who proposed that presuppositions are requirements on the common ground and that their projection behaviour should follow from the way this common ground is updated in a discourse. This idea has been worked out by various authors who made the idea of shifting context precise, most notably Heim 1983, and ...

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...

PRESUPPOSITION PROJECTION asPROOF

The Epistemics of Presupposition Projection (Abstract)

Accounts of presupposition and presupposition projection almost invariably go back to Karttunen [4, 5] and Stalnaker [9, 10]. These authors proposed an explanation for the fact that the presupposition of a conjunction A ∧ B consists of the presupposition of A conjoined with the implication assA → presB. When a speaker utters this conjunction, she may take it for granted that A after she has utt...