Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2021 / Triggering Presuppositions

Triggering Presuppositions

Paper · 2021 · Philippe Schlenker

Summary

Most presupposition research asks how presuppositions of complex sentences follow from those of their parts (the Projection Problem). Schlenker addresses a different question, the Triggering Problem. Given an expression's "bivalent content" (true vs. non-true), which entailments become presuppositions and which stay at-issue? He argues against treating this as a purely lexical fact, for two reasons. First, iconic gestures nobody has seen before still produce presuppositions; replacing a verb with an "unscrew from the ceiling" gesture presupposes the bulb is on the ceiling. Second, ordinary phrases can presuppose things they do not entail. "Pull the trigger" said of a hunter presupposes the rifle is loaded, but only because world knowledge supplies that inference. The proposed rule is that an entailment p of a content pp' counts as presupposed if, when people typically learn pp', they already knew p beforehand. The rule rests on how facts are discovered, not on discourse strategy. It links triggering to projection, since presuppositions must be trivial in their local context. The account is a sketch, limited to propositional cases.

Key points

  • The formal setting is a trivalent semantics after Heim 1983, where presupposition failure yields a third value #. Triggering is framed as dividing the "non-true" region into false vs. #.
  • The proposed rule is probabilistic: P(believe at t-1 that p | believed context C at t-1 and acquired pp' at t) ≥ a threshold a.
  • Evidence includes pro-speech gestures, ASL classifier predicates (consultant Jonathan Lamberton) and contextual or complex triggers. One gestural minimal pair compares PICK-UP-GUN-SHOOT, where the gun is visible on the table and is presupposed, with PULL-GUN-SHOOT, where the gun is hidden in a jacket and is likely not presupposed.
  • Projection is the main diagnostic for presupposition:
    • inferences survive questions, negation, if and might;
    • under none they yield universal inferences;
    • this separates them from scalar implicatures, which yield existential ones (Chemla 2009).
  • Scope and open issues:
    • Definites, pronouns, too, only/even and clefts are excluded.
    • The probabilities and threshold still need experimental measurement.
    • The rule must be extended to predicate-type triggers.
    • Its excessive context-sensitivity needs fixing.
    • Funding: ERC grant 788,077 (Orisem).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Treat presupposition as the output of a rule applied to an expression's full truth-conditional content, rather than a property listed per word; this generalizes to novel or rare expressions.
  • I2. A presupposition can come from the expression plus context, not from the words alone: hunter + pull the trigger brings in "rifle loaded" via common sense.
  • I3. The "epistemic precondition" test asks whether p is usually known before learning the whole event; this gives a principled way to split old from new information.
  • I4. A projection battery (negation, question, conditional, might, none-quantifier) cleanly separates presuppositions from at-issue content and scalar implicatures.
  • I5. The author warns that deriving triggering from communicative usage risks circularity, since usage data may simply reflect expressions that already carry lexical presuppositions.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): crate prag could derive presuppositions from a frame's precondition slots (e.g., VerbNet pre-states) instead of a hand-maintained trigger list, keeping each derivation explainable.
  • I2 (world): when building the text world, add background states that compiled knowledge guarantees for a given event-in-context, and mark them as presupposed rather than asserted.
  • I3 (world): use it to place pre-event states (stopped smoking → previously smoked) earlier on the event timeline as already-established facts.
  • I4 (learn): auto-generate embedded variants of test sentences as negative controls, checking that presupposed facts persist in the world model while at-issue ones correctly drop out.
  • I5 (learn): when LLM teacher tiers label presuppositions, validate on nonce or paraphrased items so that the labels are not just echoes of familiar trigger words.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓New York UniversityNew York · United States136 works · 86,390 citations🔬Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueParis · France104 works · 60,877 citations🔬École Normale Supérieure - PSLParis · France12 works · 3,399 citations🎓Université Paris Sciences et LettresParis · France9 works · 2,361 citations🔬École des hautes études en sciences socialesParis · France8 works · 2,159 citations🔬Institut Jean NicodParis · France6 works · 1,359 citations

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 9,086 worksArtificial Intelligence · 8,889 worksArts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPhilosophy · 211 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Implicature · 72 works

Cite

Cite as Philippe Schlenker. 2021. Triggering Presuppositions. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.1352

@article{schlenker2021triggering,
  title = {{Triggering Presuppositions}},
  author = {Philippe Schlenker},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.1352},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1352}
}

References

40 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Abbott, Barbara. 2000. Presuppositions as Nonassertions. Journal of Pragmatics 32. 1419–1437. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00108-3 ↗
  2. Abrusán, Márta. 2011. Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers. Linguistics and Philosophy 34(6). 491–535. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-012-9108-y Abrusán, Márta. To appear. The Spectrum of Perspective Shift: Free Indirect Discourse vs. Protagonist Projection. Linguistics & Philosophy. ↗
  3. Abusch, Dorit. 2002. Lexical alternatives as a source of pragmatic presuppositions. In B. Jackson (ed.), Proceedings of SALT 12, 1–19. Cornell University, CLC Publications. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt. v12i0.2867 Abusch, Dorit. 2010. Presupposition triggering from alternatives. Journal of Semantics 27(1). 37–80. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffp009 ↗
  4. Anand, Pranav and Valentine Hacquard. 2014. Factivity, belief and discourse. In L. Crnic and U. Sauerland (eds.) The Art and Craft of Semantics: A Festschrift for Irene Heim. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL. 69–90. find
  5. Beaver, David. 2010. Have you Noticed that your Belly Button Lint Colour is Related to the Colour of your Clothing? In Reyle Bäuerle, Uwe Reyle & Thomas E. Zimmermann (eds.), Presuppositions and Discourse: Essays offered to Hans Kamp, 65–100. Oxford: Elsevier. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004253162_004 Beaver, David & Bart Geurts. 2011. Presupposition. In: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/presupposition/. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-009-9043-9 ↗
  6. Büring, Daniel. 2012. Focus and Intonation. In Gillian Russell and Delia Graff Fara (ed.), Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language, 103–115. London: Routledge. find
  7. Chemla, Emmanuel. 2006. Recent Views on Presupposition. Manuscript, LSCP, Paris. find
  8. Chemla, Emmanuel. 2009. Presuppositions of quantified sentences: experimental data. Natural Language Semantics 17(4). 299–340. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-009-9043-9 ↗
  9. Chemla, Emmanuel. 2010. Similarity: towards a unified account of scalar implicatures, free choice permission and presupposition projection. Unpublished manuscript, LSCP, Paris. find
  10. Esipova, Maria. 2016. Presuppositions under Contrastive Focus: Standard Triggers and Co-speech Gestures. Manuscript, New York University. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003285 ↗
  11. Gettier, Edmund L. 1963. Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? Analysis 23(6). 121–123. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/23.6.121 Geurts, Bart. 1994. Presupposing. PhD dissertation, Universität Osnabrück. ↗
  12. Goodman, Noah D. & Michael C. Frank. 2016. Pragmatic language interpretation as probabilistic inference. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20(11). 818–829. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.08.005 ↗
  13. Greenberg, Gabriel. 2013. Beyond Resemblance. Philosophical Review 122(2). 215–287. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-1963716 Grice, H. Paul. 1981. Presupposition and Conversational Implicature. In P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, 183–198. New York: Academic Press. ↗
  14. Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations. In Comrie, Bernard & Polinsky, Maria (eds.), Causatives and transitivity, 87–120. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.23.05has ↗
  15. Heim, Irene. 1983. On the projection problem for presuppositions. In Barlow, M. and Flickinger, D. and Westcoat, M. (eds.), Second Annual West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 114–126. Stanford University. find
  16. Hobbs, Jerry R., Mark E. Stickel, Douglas E. Appelt & Paul Martin. 1993. Interpretation as abduction. Artificial Intelligence 63(1–2). 69–142. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(93)90015-4 ↗
  17. Kadmon, Nirit. 2001. Formal Pragmatics: Semantics, Pragmatics, Presupposition and Focus. Blackwell. find
  18. Lassiter, Daniel. 2011. Presuppositions, provisos, and probability. In Kierstead George (ed.), Proceedings of ESSLLI 2011: Workshop on Projective Content, 67–81. Retrieved online on August 17, 2019 at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.646.290&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Schlenker Glossa: a journal of general linguistics DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1352 ↗
  19. Lassiter, Daniel. 2012. Presuppositions, provisos, and probability. Semantics and Pragmatics 5(2). 1–37. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.2 ↗
  20. Leblanc, Hugues. 1962. Statistical and Inductive Probabilities. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc. find
  21. Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. MIT Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/5526.001.0001 ↗
  22. Romoli, Jacopo. 2014. The presuppositions of soft triggers are obligatory scalar implicatures. Journal of semantics 1. 1–47. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/fft017 ↗
  23. Rothschild, Daniel. 2011. Explaining Presupposition Projection with Dynamic Semantics. Semantics and Pragmatics 4(3). 1–43. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.4.3 ↗
  24. Sauerland, Uli. 2008. Implicated presuppositions. In A. Steube (ed.), Sentence and Context: Language, context, and cognition. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110209303.4.581 ↗
  25. Schlenker, Philippe. 2008. Be Articulate: A Pragmatic Theory of Presupposition Projection. Theoretical Linguistics 34(3). 157–212. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/THLI.2008.013 ↗
  26. Schlenker, Philippe. 2009. Local Contexts. Semantics & Pragmatics 2(3). 1–78. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/ sp.2.3 Schlenker, Philippe. 2010. Local Contexts and Local Meanings. Philosophical Studies 151(1). 115–142. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9586-0 ↗
  27. Schlenker, Philippe. 2019. Gestural Semantics: Replicating the typology of linguistic inferences with pro- and post-speech gestures. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 37(2). 735–784. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-9414-3 Schlenker, Philippe. to appear. Iconic Presuppositions. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. ↗
  28. Simons, Mandy. 2001. On the conversational basis of some presuppositions. In Rachel Hastings, Brendan Jackson & Zsofia Zvolenszky (eds.), Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 11, 431–448. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v11i0.3099 ↗
  29. Simons, Mandy, David Beaver, Craige Roberts & Judith Tonhauser. 2010. What projects and why. In N. Li & D. Lutz (Eds.), Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory 20, 309–327. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v20i0.2584 ↗
  30. Stalnaker Robert C. 1968. A Theory of Conditionals. Studies in Logical Theory, American Philosophical Quaterly, Monograph: 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9117-0_2 ↗
  31. Stalnaker, Robert C. 1974. Pragmatic presuppositions. In M. Munitz & P. Unger (Eds.), Semantics and philosophy. New York: New York University Press. find
  32. Stalnaker, Robert C. 1978. Assertion. In Peter Cole (ed.), Pragmatics, 315–322. Academic Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368873_013 Stalnaker, Robert C. 2002. Common ground. Linguistics and Philosophy 25(5–6). 701–721. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1023/A:1020867916902 Thomason, Richmond, Matthew Stone & David DeVault. 2006. Enlightened update: a computational architecture for presupposition and other pragmatic phenomena. In Donna Byron, Craige Roberts, and Scott Schwenter (eds.), Presupposition Accommodation. Prepublication version distributed by Ohio State Pragmatics Initiative, forthcoming (http://ling.osu.edu/pragwiki/ index.php). ↗
  33. Tieu, Lyn, Philippe Schlenker & Emmanuel Chemla. 2019. Linguistic Inferences Without Words. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(20). 9796–9801. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821018116 ↗
  34. Tonhauser, Judith. 2017. How to cut the projective content pie. Slides of a talk given at University of California, San Diego, December 4, 2017. find
  35. Tonhauser, Judith, David Beaver, Craige Roberts & Mandy Simons. 2013. Toward a taxonomy of projective content. Language 89(1). 66–109. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0001 ↗
  36. Tonhauser, Judith, David Beaver & Judith Degen. 2018. How projective is projective content? Gradiencein Projectivity and At-issueness. Journal of Semantics 35(3). 495–542. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ ffy007 Tonhauser, Judith & Judith Degen. 2019. Higher-probability content is more projective than lower-probability content. Abstract of a talk given at XPrag 2019, Edinburgh, June 19, 2019. von Fintel, Kai. 2008. What is presupposition accommodation, again? Philosophical Perspectives 22 (1). 137– 170. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2008.00144.x ↗
  37. Wechsler, Stephen. 2015. Word Meaning and Syntax. Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ acprof:oso/9780199279883.001.0001 Zehr, Jérémy & Florian Schwarz. 2016. Entailed vs. non-entailed presuppositions – An experimental assessment. Proceedings of NELS 46 3. 319–328. Schlenker Glossa: a journal of general linguistics DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1352 ↗
  38. TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Schlenker, Philippe. 2021. Triggering Presuppositions. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1): 35. 1–28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ gjgl.1352 ↗
  39. Submitted: 18 June 2020 Accepted: 24 January 2021 Published: 05 April 2021 find
  40. COPYRIGHT: © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schlenker-2021-triggering-presuppositions/