Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

14 Presuppositions and Pronouns
view. When we adopt the hearer's perspective, however, it becomes natural
to view accommodation in these terms. If the speaker presupposes
something that is not yet part of the common ground, then the hearer may be
prepared to go along with the speaker's pretence that his presupposition is
already given, and revise his representation of the common ground
accordingly. Viewing accommodation from the hearer's point of view helps
to bring out and motivate the following constraint on interpretation. Given
that accommodation is a repair strategy, it is reasonable to suppose that the
hearer will attempt to construe the speaker's utterance in such a way that
accommodation is required as little as possible. In other words, the hearer
will try to deal with the speaker's presuppositions, if at all possible, while
keeping his representation of the common ground fixed (and, of course, it is
mutual knowledge between the interlocutors that this is what the hearer will
do, and the speaker will devise his utterances accordingly). This principle
will play an important role in later chapters.
In the previous section we defined presuppositions as inferences that are
triggered by certain expressions, and that exhibit projection behaviour. For
Stalnaker, a presupposition is an assumption which a speaker takes for
granted. These two definitions may seem to contradict each other, but the
contradiction is only an apparent one. For we can plausibly say that a given
form of words requires that the speaker presuppose something or other. To
illustrate, a speaker who chooses to use a factive construction is thereby
obliged to presuppose that its sentential complement is true. Or, in
Stalnaker's own terms, certain expressions impose 'presuppositional
requirements' on the speaker who wants to use them. This view on the
relation between presuppositional expressions and what a speaker
presupposes is attractive because it allows for the possibility that not all
presuppositions are of lexical or grammatical origin. Later on in this chapter
I will consider one way of exploiting this leeway.
We now come to what in my opinion is the piece de resistance of Stalnaker's
work on presupposition, which is his sketch of how the pragmatic theory of
presupposition might solve the projection problem. To explain this, let us
focus on the projection behaviour of presuppositions triggered in
conjunctions and conditionals.
(31) a. It was Fred who shot the porter, and Barney took care of the
manager.
b. If it was Fred who shot the porter, then Barney took care of
the manager.
(32) a. Barney took care of the manager, and it was Fred who shot the
porter.