Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

2 Presuppositions and Pronouns
1.1 Presupposition projection
Presuppositions are pieces of information which are associated with certain
lexical items or syntactic constructions. There are many such items and
constructions, and the following is just a small selection: 1
(1) Factives F'actives
a. Fred regrets that he cheated at the exam.
b. Fred cheated at the exam.
(2) Aspectual verbs
a. Barney has stopped writing sonnets.
b. Barney has been writing sonnets.
(3) It-clefts
a. It was in July that we left for France.
b. We left for France.
(4) Wh-clefts
a. What Barney ate was potato chips.
b. Barney ate something.
(5) Quantifiers
a. The Queen has talked with all delegates.
b. There were delegates.
(6) Definites
a. The pizzeria in the Vatican is closed.
b. There is a pizzeria in the Vatican.
Someone who utters any of the (a) sentences commits himself to the truth of
the corresponding (b) sentence. Of course, this does nothing to distinguish
presuppositions from ordinary entailments. An utterance of (Sa), (5a), for
example, commits the speaker to the assumption that the Queen has talked
with all female delegates, but this is an entailment, not a presupposition. The
difference becomes apparent, however, as soon as we embed presuppositional
presupposi-
expressions or constructions into non-entailing contexts, as in:
(7) a. Barney hasn't stopped writing sonnets.
b. Maybe Barney has stopped writing sonnets.
1 The largest collection of presuppositional expressions that I know of is in an unpublished
manuscript by Karttunen, from which Levinson (1983:181-184) 181-184) quotes extensively.