Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

CHAPTER 1
Presupposition
The phenomenon called 'presupposition' gives rise to three main problems,
two of which have received much attention in the literature; the third one has
been addressed only sporadically. The problem of presupposition failure is
the oldest one. If a statement presupposes something which isn't true, what
are the consequences for the statement Will it be false or meaningless, or
perhaps wasn't it a statement in the first place These questions have been
debated with so much wit and zest that I am almost reluctant to say that I
find them of little interest. This book is not about presupposition failure, it is
about presupposition projection, which is the second main problem. When
viewed as inferences triggered by certain expressions presuppositions have
the remarkable property that, save under rather special circumstances, they
tend to go through even when the expressions that trigger them occur in non-
nonentailed
positions. This is the projection problem for presuppositions, which
is the central theme of this book. The third problem is: Where do
presuppositions come from The standard answer to this question is that
presuppositions are triggered by certain words and grammatical
constructions. But I will argue that this answer, though perhaps not false, is
not good enough.
The main concern of this book is with the projection problem, and the
main purpose of this chapter is to explain that problem, and sketch the
outlines of a solution. The projection problem is introduced in § 1.1, where I
also propose a diagnostic procedure for determining whether or not
something is a presupposition. In § 1.2, I present the intuitive notion of
presupposition which underlies the theory that I will present in later
chapters. The purpose of the next two sections (§§ 1.3 and 1.4) is to gain a
better intuitive understanding of the notion of presupposition by comparing
it to two notions that may seem to be intimately related but on closer
investigation turn out not to be, viz. conversational implicature and scope. In
the last two sections of this chapter I (very) briefly discuss the other two
problems mentioned above.
PRESUPPOSITIONS AND PRONOUNS, Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 3
B. Geurts - © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved