- 1 - Presupposition without Common Ground

There are two foundational questions to ask about presupposition: What is it? And where does it come from? The philosophical work which has most influenced linguists' understanding of presupposition is that of Robert Stalnaker (Stalnaker 1973, 1974, 2002). One aspect of Stalnaker's work on presupposition is an attempt to decouple these two questions. Stalnaker does this by providing a characterization of presupposition which allows us to say what all cases of presupposition have in common, while also allowing that the sources of presupposition may be various. The over-arching characterization is framed in terms of constraints imposed by an utterance on the contexts in which it may appropriately be uttered. Contexts, in turn, are characterized in terms of speakers' beliefs about the common ground. What is left open is the reasons why particular utterances would impose particular constraints. Stalnaker 1974 acknowledges that " in some cases, one may just have to write presupposition constraints into the dictionary entry for a particular word. " But he also conjectures that " one can explain many presupposition constraints in terms of general conversational rules without building anything about presuppositions into the meanings of particular words or constructions " (212). And indeed, he seems to favor the latter view. Stalnaker characterizes the constraints on context view as pragmatic, in order to distinguish his approach from earlier ones where presupposition was seen as bearing on the truth conditionality of sentences, a semantic property. But within this pragmatic account, he allows that some presuppositions are conventional properties of particular words or sentences; while others are the result of conversational inference. In the current linguistic literature, some version or other of Stalnaker's constraints-on-context approach is typically taken for granted, but within this framework, a distinction is still commonly made between semantic and pragmatic (or speaker) presupposition. Beaver and Zeevat (2004) make the distinction in the following way: Semantic presuppositions are conditions on the meaningfulness of a sentence or utterance: conditions on the expression of a proposition, in a static theory; or conditions on definedness of update, in a dynamic theory. In contrast to the agnosticism of Stalnaker's view, semantic presuppositions are uniformly characterized as constraints on the actual context (typically, but not always, taken to be the common ground). Pragmatic presuppositions, on the other hand, are beliefs about the context that must be attributed to a speaker. It is standard to assume that semantic presuppositions of sentences become …