Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

20 Presuppositions and Pronouns
the main goal of this section is not to argue against any particular theory,
but to delineate presuppositions from implicatures, and one way of doing
this is by showing that there is no such thing as a projection problem for
implicatures. ll 11
Presuppositions are triggered by certain lexical items and grammatical
constructions, and therefore it makes sense to say that presuppositions may
be induced in embedded positions. Conversational implicatures, in contrast,
are licensed by utterances in certain contexts, and are not, or at least not
necessarily, tied up with specific linguistic forms. Therefore, it is a category
mistake to speak of conversational implicatures as arising in embedded
positions. 12 To bring home this point, let us compare the following
examples:
(38) a. Fred kissed some of the girls.
b. It is not the case that Fred kissed all the girls.
(39) a. Wilma believes that Fred kissed some of the girls.
b. It is not the case that Wilma believes that Fred kissed all the
girls.
The definite NP the girls triggers the presupposition that there were girls,
and sure enough both (38a) and (39a) inherit this presupposition, for
normally speaking either one of these statements would be taken to imply
that a group of girls is contextually given. At the same time, these sentences
seem to somehow imply the falsity of (38b) and (39b), respectively.13 These
inferences may be construed as conversational implicatures, along the
following lines. It is plausible to suppose that the truth conditions associated
with some are such that (38a) is strictly speaking true even in a situation
where all the girls were kissed by Fred. An utterance of (38a) in such a
situation might be misleading but it would not be false. Nonetheless, the
11 11 Sadock (1978) and Karttunen and Peters (1979) have proposed that (some) presuppositions
are really conventional implicatures, but, as Levinson (1983: 217) observes, since the concept of
conventional implicature is such as troubled one, this is just a terminological sidestep, and I will
not consider it further. In general, when I speak of 'implicatures' tout court, I will mean
conversational implicatures.
12 12 It might be argued that only generalized conversational implicatures show projection
behaviour (cf. Levinson 1997). Since, according to Grice (1975), a generalized conversational
implicature is associated with 'a certain form of words' (which I take to imply that it is a
conventionalized conversational implicature), it would at least be conceptually coherent to
claim that implicatures can be triggered in embedded positions. But otherwise this position
suffers from the same problems that I will discuss in the following.
13 13 In the case of (39a) it is tempting to infer that Wilma believes that Fred didn't kiss all the girls,
which is stronger than (39b). But this inference can be left out of account here.