Abstract:
Several theories of
presupposition projection incorrectly predict that some sentences which
yield unconditional presuppositions should have weaker, conditional
ones. For instance, If John is unwise, he will continue to smoke is
predicted to have the presupposition that if John is unwise, he smoked,
whereas one certainly infers that John did in fact smoke. We summarize
some difficulties faced by two prominent solutions, DRT and Singh’s
‘Formal Alternatives’; we then offer a new analysis which is compatible
with several semantic theories of projection, and which (unlike Singh’s
theory) does not require the addition of a new representational module.
In essence, we obtain unconditional inferences by assuming that
speakers may ignore certain parts of a sentence when they
accommodate a presupposition – presumably to simplify their
computational work. They do so by adding to the context an assumption
that would satisfy the presupposition of the sentence no matter which
meaning some of its elements have. Depending on which elements are
ignored in this way, a variety of strengthened presuppositions are
obtained. We briefly sketch a mechanism (which follows some of Singh’s
earlier ideas) to determine which of these strengthened inferences are
in fact obtained. The analysis correctly predicts some new instances of
the Proviso Problem in quantificational examples.