Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Presupposition 31
describes a transition from one state to another: from growing tulips tUlips to not
growing tulips (63a), from not growing tulips to growing tulips (63b), and
from growing tulips to growing even more tulips tUlips (63c). In each case it is the
initial state whose existence is presupposed, not the ensuing one, and this
observation turns out to apply to all transition verbs (apart from those in
(63) there are: discontinue, go on, persist in, and so on) as well as to particles
like still, already, anymore, and so on. Of course, this regularity could be
captured by devising a rule that states that all these items have this property,
instead of stipulating it for each separately,19 but one suspects that this rule
should somehow follow from some semantic and/or pragmatic property that
these expressions have in common.
It should be noted that, intuitively speaking, it is eminently reasonable that
aspectual verbs should have the presuppositions that they in fact have. It
seems unlikely that we should ever come across a verb that meant exactly the
same thing as begin with the only difference that it presupposes what begin
asserts and vice versa. And I believe that it is intuitively clear why this should
be so. It is because interlocutors are more interested in where the story is
leading to than where it came from, and therefore tend to take the past as
given. If a change is described, the initial state is in a sense backgrounded
because we are more interested in the present and the future. And this
backgrounding corresponds with presupposition.
Before I try to draw a moral from this observation, let me introduce a
second example. Factive predicates presuppose their complements.
Compare:
(64)
nice }
. tragic .. .
It IS disgusting that Fred IS readmg Kropotkm.
{
odd
(65)
likely }
. ossible .. .
It IS Pb· that Fred IS readmg Kropotkm.
{ o VIOUS
true
The standard tests show that the factive predicates in (64) trigger the
presupposition that Fred is reading Kropotkin, whereas the predicates in
(65) don't. Why is that To begin with, note that, whereas all variants in (64)
entail that Fred is reading Kropotkin, not all variants of (65) do. If it is
obvious or true that Fred is reading Kropotkin, then Fred must be reading