Presupposition and Relevance

Abstract

This chapter offers a novel pragmatic account of presupposition, according to which presuppositions are neither properties of sentences (as in the traditional semantic account) nor of speakers (as in the widely held Stalnakerian account), but rather of utterances. Specifically, the presuppositions of an utterance are those propositions which guarantee its relevance, where relevance is understood in the Relevance Theoretic sense. The presuppositions of a given utterance may arise from purely pragmatic inference, driven by the assumption that the utterance is intended to be maximally relevant to the addressee. But presuppositions may also be lexically encoded. On the proposed account, the role of lexical presupposition triggers is to mark certain elements of content as relevance-establishers. The chapter demonstrates that this approach to presupposition straightforwardly accounts for some of the standard properties of presupposition.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.