In this paper the satisfaction approach towards presuppositions is made more compatible with some empirical phenomena by assuming that (i) contexts should contain more information than they are usually said to contain, (ii) that the idea that contexts represent what the speaker is assuming for the sake of conversation should be taken more seriously than is usually done, and (iii) that not all p...

The ability to efficiently process presuppositions, which contain information that the speaker believes to be in the background to the conversation, is essential for effective communication. To get a deeper understanding of the nature and the time-course of temporal presupposition processing, we examined event-related potential evoked by the word again in two types of sentence contexts. The wor...

Presupposition projection in quantified sentences is at the center of debates in the presupposition literature. This paper reports on a survey revealing inter-speaker variation regarding which quantifier yields universal inferences—which Q in QpBqpλx.Cpxqppxqq supports the inference @x P B: ppxq. We observe an implication that if some yields a universal inference for a speaker, no, and any in a...

In this paper, we study Verb-phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and show its relationship to presupposition and its failure. We represent VPE by means of a dynamic semantics approach, using an extended version of Dynamic Predicate Logic (Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1991) which includes local variables and procedures. We focus on the representation of the strict/sloppy ambiguity in connection with ellipsis cons...

I propose a new theory of scalar implicatures: the speaker should be in the same epistemic status with respect to alternatives obtained via similar transformations (e.g., replacements of a scalar items with various stronger items). This theory extends naturally to explain presupposition projection. Cases where scalar items and presupposition triggers co-occur are also accounted for. The main fo...

This paper describes and evaluates a detector of presuppositions (DP) for survey questions. Incorrect presuppositions can make it difficult to answer a question correctly. Since they can be difficult to detect, DP is a useful tool for questionnaire designer. DP performs well using local characteristics of presuppositions. It reports the presupposition to the survey methodologist who can determi...

0. Introduction The current literature on presupposition focuses almost exclusively on the projection problem: the question of how and why the presuppositions of atomic clauses are projected to complex sentences which embed them. Very little attention has been paid to the question of how and why these presuppositions arise at all. As Kay (1992, p.335) observes, " treatments of the presuppositio...