ENS15-1-Presupposition

Presupposition

Philippe Schlenker

(LINGUAE, Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University)

Cogmaster, December 2015-January 2016 (LC2)

Instructor: Philippe Schlenker

Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris

Global Distinguished Professor, New York University

Euryi Project Leader, ESF; Advanced Grant Leader, ERC

E-mail: philippe.schlenker@gmail.com

Teaching Assistant: Jeremy Kuhn, Institut Jean-Nicod

E-mail: jeremy.d.kuhn@gmail.com

Topic

In the 1980's, the analysis of 'presupposition projection' led to the development of a new and more powerful type of semantics, called 'dynamic semantics'. In recent years, pragmatic alternatives within classical semantics were developed. We will provide an introduction to this debate, first by developing an explicit 'dynamic semantics' for presuppositions , and then by developing a pragmatic alternative to it, the 'Transparency Theory'.

Requirements

Besides active class participation:

(i) read the assigned papers;

(ii) formal exercises will be assigned.

Slides, Problem Sets and Readings: they are available in this Dropbox folder.

Sessions (still tentative; to be adapted as we go)

Basic Readings on Presuppositions

• Origins of the Dynamic Approach

Heim, I.: 1983, On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions. In D. Flickinger et al. (eds), Proceedings of the Second West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 114-125. Reprinted in Davis, S. (ed): 1991, Pragmatics: A Reader, Oxford University Press [pdf]

Stalnaker, R.: 1974, Pragmatic Presuppositions. In Munitz, M. and Unger, P. (eds.) Semantics and Philosophy. New York: New York University Press. Reprinted in Davis, S. (ed): 1991, Pragmatics: A Reader, Oxford University Press. [pdf]

Karttunen, L.: 1974, Presupposition and Linguistic Context. Theoretical Linguistics 1: 181-194. Reprinted in Davis (ed): 1991, Pragmatics: A Reader, Oxford University Press. [pdf]

• Presuppositions

Geurts, B.: 1999, Presupposition and Pronouns. Elsevier. Some chapters are available here:

Chapter one: Presupposition

Chapter two: The binding theory

Chapter four: Dynamic semantics

Chapter six: Modals

Kadmon, N.: 2001, Formal Pragmatics. Blackwell.

Heim, I.: 1990, Presupposition Projection. In R. van der Sandt (ed.) "Presupposition, Lexical Meaning and Discourse Processes: Workshop Reader," University of Nijmegen, 1990. Available here through Semantics Archive.

Additional Readings on Presuppositions

Be Articulate and Local Contexts

Schlenker, P.: 2008, "Be Articulate: A Pragmatic Theory of Presupposition Projection". Theoretical Linguistics 34:3, 157-212 [pdf]

Schlenker, P.: 2009, "Local Contexts". Semantics and Pragmatics 2, 3: 1–78, 2009 [pdf]

Schlenker, P.: 2010, "Presuppositions and Local Contexts". Mind 2010 [pdf] (short and relatively non-technical)

Schlenker, Philippe: 2011, “Presupposition Projection: Two Theories of Local Contexts – Part I”. Language and Linguistics Compass 5, 12: 848–857, DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2011.00299.x

Schlenker, Philippe: 2011, “Presupposition Projection: Two Theories of Local Contexts – Part II”. Language and Linguistics Compass 5, 12: 858–879 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2011.00300.x

Trivalence

Fox, Danny (2008) Two short notes on Schlenker’s theory of presupposition projection. Theoretical Linguistics 34, 3: 237-252 [pdf]

George, B. R. (2008) 'Presupposition Repairs: a Static, Trivalent Approach to Predicting Projection’, M.A. thesis, UCLA. [pdf]

George, B. R. (2008) ‘Predicting Presupposition Projection: some alternatives in the strong Kleene tradition’, manuscript, UCLA. [pdf]

Peters, S.: 1979, A Truth-Conditional Formulation of Karttunen's Account of Presupposition. Synthese 40, 2: 301-316 [pdf]

Experimental Approaches

Chemla, Emmanuel (2009). "Presuppositions of quantified sentences: experimental data". Natural Language Semantics 17(4), pp 299-340, doi:10.1007/s11050-009-9043-9 [pdf]

Chemla, Emmanuel and Lewis Bott (in press). "Processing presuppositions: dynamic semantics vs pragmatic enrichment". Language and Cognitive Processes. [pdf]

Chemla, Emmanuel and Schlenker, Philippe (2012). "Incremental vs. Symmetric Accounts of Presupposition Projection: An Experimental Approach". Natural Language Semantics 20(2), pp 177-226, doi:10.1007/s11050-012-9080-7. [pdf]

Further topics

• Maximize Presupposition

Singh, Raj (2010) "Maximize Presupposition! and Local Contexts" [pdf] Accepted with minor revisions in Natural Language Semantics.

Percus, Orin (2006) "Antipresuppositions". [pdf] In A. Ueyama(ed.), Theoretical and Empirical Studies of Reference and Anaphora: Toward the establishment of generative grammar as an empirical science, Report of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), Project No. 15320052, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 52-73

• Triggering Problem

Abrusan, Marta (2010) "Triggering Verbal Presuppositions" [pdf] Manuscript, Oxford.

• The DRT Alternative to Dynamic Semantics

van der Sandt, R.: 1992, Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution. Journal of Semantics: 9: 333-377 [pdf]

• Formal Properties of the Transparency Theory

Schlenker, P.: 2007, Anti-Dynamics: Presupposition Projection Without Dynamic Semantics. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 16, 3: 325-256 (32 pages)

• Other papers in the trivalent tradition

Beaver, D. and Krahmer, E.: 2001, A Partial Account of Presupposition Projection. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 10, 2. Available here.

• Accommodation

Beaver, D. and Zeevat, H.: to appear, Accommodation. In Ramchand, G. and C. Reiss (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, Oxford University Press.

• General Survey

Beaver, D.: 1997: Presupposition. In J. van Benthem and A. ter Meulen (eds.), The Handbook of Logic and Language, Elsevier, pp. 939-1008.