Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

32 Presuppositions and Pronouns
Kropotkin; but this does not follow if is just likely or possible. Apparently, a
predicate can entail its complement and not be factive. A more systematic
difference between (64) and (65) is that the former are paraphrasable with
'the fact that', while the latter must rather be paraphrased with, say, 'the
story that':
nice }
fact .. ., tragic
(66) The { } that Fred IS readmg Kropotkmls disgusting .
story
{
odd
likely to be true}
(67) The { *fact } that Fred is reading Kropotkin is po~sibly true .
story
{ ObvIOusly true
true
(The question mark in (66) is not to imply that this variant is ill-formed but
that it is inadequate as a paraphrase of (64).) This contrast does not yet
explain the difference between the factive predicates in (64) and their nonf
counterparts in (65), however. Even if it is true that factives f take facts
as arguments, while non-factives don't, it doesn't follow from this that
factives are presupposition inducers (there is no a priori reason why facts
should be presupposed). Furthermore, this observation only reformulates
nonfactive
the original problem: Why is it that certain predicates take facts as
arguments
The distinctive property of the non-factives in (65) is that they comment
on the alethic or epistemic status of their arguments, and this is why they
cannot take their truth for granted. If someone asserts the truth of a
proposition, he cannot simultaneously presuppose that it is true, and if
something is claimed to be likely or possible, it cannot be presupposed,
either. But even if this explains why the examples in (65) do not presuppose
that Fred is reading Kropotkin, it does not explain why the examples in (64)
do. What I want to suggest, if only tentatively, is that the factives in (64)
induce the presupposition that Fred is reading Kropotkin because there is no
reason why they should not. A speaker who asserts that it is disgusting that
Fred is reading Kropotkin conveys the two-part message (i) that Fred is
reading Kropotkin, and (ii) that this is disgusting. The second part contains
the main point the speaker has to make; the first part is a prerequisite for the
first, but it is of secondary importance. In this sense, the first part is
backgrounded -— and therefore it is presupposed.
Generalizing from these examples, my suggestion is the following. The
content of an utterance is complex, not only at sentence level but also below
that; even the content of a single word will rarely be a simple matter. In view