Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 2
(28) There is a king of France and the king of France is bald.
(29) There is a king of France. The king of France is bald.
Stalnaker’s analysis lets sentences joined by conjunction to be semantically
symmetrical, but pragmatically asymmetrical in the way the information contributed
by speakers is understood, keeping standard semantic definitions of logical
connectives but changing their effect with regard to presupposition by defining
them from the perspective of the speaker’s intended contribution. One of the nice
things about his analysis is that many of the predictions about presupposition
projection that are stipulated without a clear motivation in Karttunen (1973) and
others become natural consequences of dealing with presuppositions as
assumptions made by the speaker.
Karttunen (1974) offered a solution to the projection problem which is close
to the ideas present in Stalnaker (1973, 1974). Rather than asking what
presuppositions of a sentence will be projected to be part of the context, he asked
instead what the context would have to be like to satisfy or admit the sentence with
its presuppositions. Contexts should be appropriate for the presuppositions of the
utterances that speakers use, and he defined admittance conditions on contexts for
complex sentences with presuppositions joined by different logical connectives. He
associates with each sub-clause of a sentence a so-called local context. The local
context is the context plus the contribution of the earlier analyzed clauses. For
example, the local context of the consequent of a conditional is the main context,
i.e the context where it is used, plus the information contributed by the antecedent
of the conditional. The local context of the second part of two simples sentence
joined by conjunction is the main context, plus the information contributed by the
first conjunct. The local context should satisfy the presuppositions of the clause
with the presupposition triggering expression, that is, elementary presuppositions
should be admitted by the local context in which they are used. Sentences with
presuppositions are thus interpreted using a recursive contextual update
mechanism that calculates what the context must be like for update to occur. For
example, when interpreting the presuppositions of two simple sentences joined by
conjunction, the sentence can only update the context if two things are true. The
original context, which is the local context for the first conjunct, has to admit the
presupposed information in the first conjunct by entailing its presuppositions.
Additionally, the context that admitted the first conjunct together with the first
conjunct makes up the local context for the second conjunct and also has to admit
the latter by entailing is presupposition. Otherwise the context does not admit the
sentence as a whole. For example, in (27), if we begin with an empty context c, this
context must admit the presupposition of the first conjunct of this sentence. In this
case there isn’t one and the context can simply be updated with the asserted
information. The updated context must then admit the second conjunct by
entailing its presupposition, which it does, i.e. there is a king of France already
given in the context, and this context can then be successfully updated with the
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