Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 2
Because true presuppositions should display this kind of context dependent
behavior we need to test proposed triggers for this property as well. This second
part of Geurts (1999) PTB tests for context dependence in complex sentences. If a
sentence can be embedded in one of the patterns given in (19) below without having
the induced presupposition project out, we can be even more certain that it is a true
presupposition trigger. (Taken from Geurts, 1999, p. 6)
(19) a. if χ then ϕ {χ}
b. it is possible that χ and ϕ {χ}
c. either not χ or ϕ {χ}
Example (17)a actually illustrates an utterance with the pattern in (19)a and example
(18) illustrates the pattern in (19)b. It is fairly easy to modify the earlier examples to
test for the other two and that is left to the reader. When presuppositions are
triggered in these contexts they do not project.
It was many years until it was recognized that difficulties in interpreting the
triggered presuppositions of complex sentences just hints at a much bigger issue.
Whether or not presuppositions project depends on the information in the context
in which they are used. The problem is not how to interpret presupposed material
in complex sentences but how to interpret presupposed material in context. Much
of the early work on presupposition has tried to handle projection at a sentence
level, perhaps because most semantic work was at that time only equipped to deal
with sentence level phenomena. But to correctly interpret presuppositions we need
a way to account for the effects of the discourse context 3 on their interpretation,
i.e. we need a framework that can manipulate or represent the information
contributed by the entire discourse.
The third and final part of the PTB tests if presuppositions can, given the
correct context, be denied or cancelled. 4 One of the examples he gives is presented
below (taken from Geurts 1999, examples 20, p. 7)
(20) a. It isn’t Betty who kissed Fred – in fact, Fred wasn’t kissed at all.
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b. It’s possible that it’s Betty who kissed Fred, but it’s also possible that he
wasn’t kissed at all.
Examples (20)a and (20)b illustrate it-cleft presuppositions. The presupposition is
denied in a-sentence, and it is embedded in a modal context in b-sentence, both
3 By discourse context I mean the information contributed before the utterances to be analyzed is
made, that is the linguistic information that is considered to be part of the discourse record.
4 Wilson (1975)and Kempson (1975) have argued that presupposition as a semantic relationship
actually doesn’t exist. What people have termed presuppositions are just the entailments of
simple sentences that in complex sentences are no longer entailed. They argued that this is easy to
see because they can always be cancelled, and that the reason why we tend to understand
presupposed material as projected out of different types of embeddings is because of other
pragmatic factors.