Course:

Lecturer: Paul Marty

Presuppositions and scalar implicatures are two of the most studied inferences in semantics and pragmatics. In this class, we will be focusing on the less well-known interactions between these two kinds of inferences, a research topic that has received more and more attention in the recent literature. We will begin with an informal overview of the cases where our understanding of `what is presupposed’ appears to be strengthened in various ways by implicature-like inferences. We will then turn to investigate the core properties of these inferences (e.g., their strength, distribution, context-dependency) and explore different ways to model them. Through this study, we will (attempt to) address the following two questions: (i) What is the nature of the mechanisms/principles involved in presuppositional strengthening? (ii) Are those mechanisms/principles distinct from or reducible to those already posited by current theories of scalar implicatures?