Presuppositions of quantified sentences : Experimental Data ∗

Some theories (e.g., Beaver, 1994, 2001) assume that sentences with presupposition triggers in the scope of a quantifier carry an existential presupposition, as in (2), others (e.g., Heim, 1983 or Schlenker, 2008a,b) assume that they carry a universal presupposition, as in (3). (1) No student knows that he is lucky. (2) Existential presupposition: At least one student is lucky. (3) Universal presupposition: Every student is lucky. This work is an experimental investigation of this issue. In short, naive speakers were recruited to evaluate the robustness of the inference from (1) to (3). The first result is that presuppositions triggered from the scope of the quantifier No are universal. More importantly, the present results suggest that the presuppositions triggered from the scope of a given quantifier depend on the quantifier 1 Theoretical situation 1.1 Presuppositions as inferences Each of the sentences below presupposes that John is lucky: (1) a. John knows that he’s lucky. b. John doesn’t know that he’s lucky. 5 c. Does John know that he’s lucky? Intuitively, this amounts to saying that these sentences are more natural in conversations where participants agree, or are likely to agree, that John is lucky (e.g., Stalnaker, 1970, 1973, 1974, Karttunen, 1974). As a result, presuppositions can be treated as inferences: a speaker who utters a sentence which triggers a presupposition p is committed to p being true. The inferential process at play is called “(global) accommodation” 10 and it is only through this prism that presuppositions will be approached. Let’s go back to what’s interesting about (1). The sentence in (1b) is the negation of (1a) and these two sentences should thus roughly convey opposite meanings, but they do not: both of them imply that John is lucky. Similarly, the third sentence (1c) is a question, it questions the truth of (1a) but yet it still implies that John is lucky. In short, presuppositions are inferences or pieces of meaning which resist negation and inter15 rogation. The paradigm in (1) illustrates the projection problem of presupposition: how do presuppositions interact with various embeddings and various linguistic operators? ∗I am very grateful to Philippe Schlenker, he contributed to every stage of this work. I am also grateful to David Beaver, Simon Charlow, Anne Christophe, Paul Égré, Anne-Caroline Fievet, Danny Fox, Vincent de Gardelle, Bart Geurts, Ben George, Irene Heim, Christophe Pallier, Raj Singh, Benjamin Spector, Alba Tuninetti and Inga Vendelin for their invaluable help, be it practical or theoretical. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the OSU Workshop on Presupposition Accommodation in 2006 with the support of the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-0548305, at the LF reading-group at MIT and at the Xprag conference in Berlin in 2007, at the UCL colloquium and at the DIP colloquium of the ILLC in 2008. I am grateful for lively discussions on each of these occasions. Part of this work was supported by a ’Euryi’ grant from the European Science Foundation (”Presupposition: A Formal Pragmatic Approach”).