Abstract
Is presupposition a semantic or genuinely pragmatic notion? My answer in this paper is that it is a pragmatic notion and I provide explanantions for this view, mainly related to cancellability. Of course, it is not easy to extract theoretical considerations from data and it is possible that one gives an opnionated interpretation of the data. However, at least I wish to propose that in the case of presuppositions data have to be seen in a different way and new data must also be consulted.
The concept of speaker meaning was the fundamental concept of Paul Grice’s account of speech, and it was his central thesis that this concept can and should be analysed independently of any institutional linguistic practice. (…) The reason he insisted on this was that he wanted to give a basis for understanding the institution of language as a device that has the function of meaning things, and to separate an account of the functions that language was designed to serve from an account of the means that language provides for serving those functions. The hope was that separating means from ends would help to clarify the specific conventional mechanisms that language provides.(Stalnaker 2008, 539).
It took me 23 years to complete this chapter. When I discussed these ideas with the late Anna Morpurgo Davis during lunch in Somerville College, Oxford, she smiled intensely. Now that I am able to offer a demonstration of those ideas with some degree of confidence, I dedicate this chapter to her.
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Notes
- 1.
Although linguists are dogmatically committed to the view that presuppositions are entailed in positive sentences, in this chapter I will use some examples by Levinson (1983), Simons (2013) and myself to show that this need not be the case. We are not the only scholars open to the idea that presuppositions need not be entailed. Williamson (2000) (in the context of an essay on human knowledge and its limits) considers that the sentence ‘She heard that the volcano was erupting’ need not entail that it is a fact that the volcano erupted. The sentence more or less amounts to ‘She heard the report that the volcano erupted’. Yet, even if the sentence is not factive, it is presuppositional (if stress is placed on ‘heard’ (analogously it is presuppositional if the verb is combined with the clitic in the Italian translation (as in ‘Lei lo ha sentito che il vulcano stave eruttando’))). Other examples involving the verbs ‘understand’, ‘imagine’ etc. are discussed in Capone (1998, 2000).
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Simons (2013) provides at least two interesting examples of cancellability in connection with factive predicates:
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(b)
I notice that you keep chewing on your pencil. Have you recently stopped smoking? (Uttered in an ignorance context). (Admittedly, this example is taken from Geurts 1994).
As Simons states, “In this situation, the addressee knows that the speaker is ignorant of her current or prior smoking habits, and in particular cannot be assuming that she (the addressee) was recently a smoker. The speaker is understood merely as asking whether the addressee has undergone any relevant change of state from being a smoker to not being one” (Simons 2013, 332). I quite agree here with Simons that this is a case of cancellability of a presupposition, but the problem for us is not to demonstrate that presuppositions can be defeated in questions or under negation, but that they evaporate in positive sentences too. The other example proposed by Simons (2013, 332) is the following:
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I don’t know if Jane ever rented “Manhattan” before, but perhaps she has and is renting it again.
I quite agree that here, too, the presupposition triggered by ‘again’ disappears but, after all, this is a case of presupposition projection in complex sentences and we know that, on the satisfaction account of presupposition, the presupposition of ‘again’ evaporates because the potentially presupposed presupposition is asserted before the assertion of the presuppositional utterance. (Thus, at the level of the complex sentence, the proposition that she rented it has been asserted and is, accordingly, not presupposed). Despite the fact that the cancellation of the presupposition is due to the projection problem of presupposition, this is nevertheless an important case, as here the presupposition evaporates even though it is triggered by a lexeme occurring in a positive sentence.
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(b)
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Capone, A. (2019). Conversational Presuppositions. Presupposition as Defeasible (And Non-defeasible) Inference. In: Pragmatics and Philosophy. Connections and Ramifications. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19146-7_12
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