Presuppositions in Context: Constructing Bridges
نویسندگان
چکیده
Traditionally, a distinction is made between that what is asserted by uttering a sentence and that what is presupposed. Presuppositions are characterized as those propositions which persist even if the sentence which triggers them is negated. Thus ‘The king of France is bald’ presupposes that there is a king of France, since this follows from both ‘The king of France is bald’ and ‘It is not the case that the king of France is bald’. Stalnaker (1974) put forward the idea that a presupposition of an asserted sentence is a piece of information which is assumed by the speaker to be part of the common background of the speaker and interpreter. The presuppositions as anaphors theory of Van der Sandt (1992) — currently the best theory of presupposition as far as empirical predictions are concerned (Beaver 1997:983)— can be seen as one advanced realization of Stalnaker’s basic idea. The main insight of Van der Sandt is that there is an interesting correspondence between the behaviour of anaphoric pronouns in discourse and the projection of presuppositions (i.e., whether and how presuppositions survive in complex sentences). Like most research in this area, Van der Sandt’s work concentrates on the interaction between presuppositions and the linguistic context (i.e., the preceding sentences). However, not only linguistic context interacts with presuppositions. Consider:
منابع مشابه
The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Presuppositions in Context : Constructing Bridges
متن کامل
An Implemented Formalism for Computing Linguistic Presuppositions and Existential Commitments
We rely on the strength of linguistic and philosophical perspectives in constructing a framework that offers a unified explanation for presuppositions and existential commitment. We use a rich ontology and a set of methodological principles that embed the essence of Meinong’s philosophy and Grice’s conversational principles into a stratified logic, under an unrestricted interpretation of the qu...
متن کاملThe Semantics and Pragmatics of Presupposition
In this paper, we offer a novel analysis of presuppositions, paving particular attention to the interaction between the knowledge resources that are required to interpret them. The analysis has two main features. First, we capture an analogy between presuppositions, anaphora and scope ambiguity (cf. van der Sandt 1992), by utilizing semantic underspecification (c£ Reyle 1993). Second, resolving...
متن کاملPresuppositions and Quantifier Domains
In this paper, I will argue for a new account of presuppositions which is based on double indexing as well as minimal representational contexts providing antecedent material for anaphoric presuppositions, rather than notions of context defined in terms of the interlocutors' pragmatic presuppositions or the information accumulated from the preceding discourse. This account applies in particular ...
متن کاملThe role of presuppositions and situations in the interpretation of adverbial quantifiers
This paper describes a method for computing the domain of quantification of an adverbially quantified sentence. This method relies on the accommodation of presuppositions in the scope of a quantificational adverb and on the resolution of the domain in context. Situations form the link between adverbial quantifiers and presuppositions, as adverbial quantifiers are taken to quantify over situatio...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1997