Local Contexts and Local Meanings

Stalnaker (1974, 1979) made two seminal claims about presuppositions. The most influential one was that presupposition projection is computed by a pragmatic mechanism based on a notion of ‘local context’. Due to conceptual and technical difficulties, however, the latter notion was reinterpreted in purely semantic terms within ‘dynamic semantics’ (Heim 1983). The second claim was that some instances of presupposition generation should also be explained in pragmatic terms. But despite various attempts, the definition of a precise ‘triggering algorithm’ has remained somewhat elusive. We discuss possible extensions of both claims. First, we offer a reconstruction of ‘local contexts’ which circumvents some of the difficulties faced by Stalnaker’s original analysis. We preserve the idea that local contexts are computed by a pragmatic mechanism that aggregates the information that follows from an incomplete sentence given the global context; but we crucially rely on a modified notion of entailment (‘R-entailment’), whose plausibility should be assessed on independent grounds. Second, we speculate that local contexts might prove necessary (though by no means sufficient) to understand how some presuppositions are triggered. In a nutshell, we suggest that a presupposition is triggered when the semantic contribution of an expression to its local context is in some sense ‘heterogeneous’. Without giving an analysis of the latter notion, we note that this architecture implies that presuppositions should be triggered on the basis of the meaning that an expression has relative to its local context (what we call its ‘local meaning’); we sketch some possible consequences of this analysis. 'Assertion' (Stalnaker 1979) is in some respects the culmination of a research program, initiated in the early 1970's, which sought to provide an articulated notion of context change to analyze rich arrays of phenomena at the semantics/pragmatics interface. In this article, we focus on Stalnaker’s contribution to the theory of presupposition. Two seminal suggestions were made in his work. The first and most influential one sought to explain how the presuppositions of complex sentences are computed from the meanings of their parts (‘Projection Problem’). The second suggestion tried to explain how the presuppositions of (some) elementary expressions are generated to begin with (‘Triggering Problem’). 1. Stalnaker’s first claim was that presupposition projection should be explained within an analysis which (i) countenances local contexts, and (ii) explicates context change in pragmatic terms (Stalnaker 1974, 1979). Local contexts were also posited by Karttunen 1974 and subsequently by Heim 1983, followed by all of dynamic semantics. But these authors took context change to be a semantic process, which is encoded in the lexical entries of various expressions. By contrast, Stalnaker attempted to give a purely pragmatic analysis of context change. Due to conceptual and technical difficulties, however, the semantic line came to dominate presupposition studies, and Stalnaker’s pragmatic inspiration was in part lost in the process. Many thanks to Emmanuel Chemla for comments and suggestions, and to Simon Charlow for discussion of the data. The first part of this paper is an attempt to answer a question raised by Nathan Klinedinst at University College London in November 2005. The theory of local contexts developed in this paper is technically similar to that of Schlenker 2009b, c; some expository and technical parts are common to these papers. However the present theory is motivated in a very different way; in particular, we will take local contexts to represent the information that is ‘entailed’ (in a generalized sense) by the global context together with what was uttered. No such notion was present in Schlenker 2009a, b, whose definition of local context was less closely related to Stalnaker’s ideas. 1 As Stalnaker write in his replies, he himself does not use this term. What we call ‘local context’ would for him be the (original) context set as modified by a sentence or part of a sentence.