Mandy Simons

On the Conversational Basis of Some Presuppositions

This paper, originally published in 2001, deals with the question of the source of presuppositions, focusing on the question of whether presuppositions are conventional properties of linguistic expressions, or arise as inferences derivable from ordinary content in combination with some general conversational principles. I argue that at least some presuppositions should be analysed as conversational inferences, on the grounds that they show two of the hallmarks of such inferences: contextual defeasibility and nondetachability. I make this case for the presuppositions associated with change of state predicates and with factives. I argue further for the need for a general principle for deriving presuppositions as inferences by illustrating a variety of cases of presupposition-like inferences not clearly involving a lexical presupposition trigger. In the second half of the paper, I move towards the development of a general conversational account of the relevant presuppositions. Building on a brief comment in Stalnaker (1974), I develop the following pair of ideas: first, that an utterance embedding a proposition P may be seen as raising the question whether P; and second, that P may be related to a further proposition Q in such a way that it would make sense to raise the question whether P only if one already believed Q to be true. It is these required prior beliefs that constitute conversationally derived presuppositions. Although the account developed here is only a preliminary attempt, the relevance of contextually salient questions, or sets of alternatives, to an account of presupposition has been taken up in subsequent work, notably Abusch (2010) and Simons et al. (2010).

Presupposition and Accommodation: Understanding the Stalnakerian picture *

This paper offers a critical analysis ofStalnakers work on presupposition (Stalnaker1973, 1974, 1979, 1999, 2002). The paperexamines two definitions of speakerpresupposition offered by Stalnaker – the familiar common ground view, and the earlier,less familiar, dispositional account – and howStalnaker relates this notion to the linguisticphenomenon of presupposition. Special attentionis paid to Stalnakers view of accommodation. Iargue that given Stalnaker’s views,accommodation is not rightly seen as driven bythe presuppositional requirements ofutterances, but only by the interests ofspeakers in eliminating perceived differencesamong presuppositions. I also consider therevisions which are needed either to thedefinition of speaker presupposition or to thedefinition of sentence presupposition in lightof the possibility of informativepresupposition. In the concluding section, Idiscuss the ways in which some recent accountsof context and speaker presupposition departfrom their Stalnakerian foundations.

The Best Question: Explaining the Projection Behavior of Factives

This article deals with projection in factive sentences. The article first challenges standard assumptions by presenting a series of detailed observations about the interpretations of factive sentences in context, showing that what implication projects, if any, is quite variable and that projection is tightly constrained by prosodic and contextual information about the alternatives under consideration. The article then proposes an account which accommodates the variability of the data and sensitivity to contextual alternatives. The account is formulated within a modified version of Roberts 1996/2012 question-based model of discourse.

Local pragmatics in a Gricean framework

Abstract The pragmatic framework developed by H.P. Grice in “Logic and Conversation” explains how a speaker can mean something more than, or different from, the conventional meaning of the sentence she utters. But it has been argued that the framework cannot give a similar explanation for cases where these pragmatic effects impact the understood content of an embedded clause, such as the antecedent of a conditional, a clausal disjunct, or the clausal complement of a verb. In this paper, I show that such an explanation is available. One of the central arguments of the paper (Section 2) is that in a significant subset of cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of a global (utterance-level) pragmatic requirement. In these cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of ‘acting locally’ to resolve a potential global pragmatic violation. These cases do not require us to posit application of pragmatic principles (Maxims of Conversation) to the contents of embedded clauses. The account does, though, require the assumption that interpreters can identify and reason about the contents of unasserted sub-parts of sentences, an assumption that I motivate in section 3. Building on this, in section 4 of the paper, I argue that once we have recognized that interpreters can, and do, reason independently about the contents of non-asserted clauses, it becomes unproblematic to assume that in some cases, Gricean conversational principles do apply directly to these contents, providing an alternative route to account for local pragmatic effects. In revisiting the ideas of this paper in my response to the commentaries, I consider in more detail the revisions to Grice’s broader program that are necessitated by these moves, in particular acknowledging the problematicity of Grice’s notion of what is said. I argue that the starting point for Gricean reconstructions should instead be merely what is expressed, which carries no pragmatic commitments regarding what is speaker meant.

A closer look at strengthened readings of scalars

The majority of the extensive experimental and theoretical literature on scalar strengthening assumes that the phenomenon is uniform across all types of scalars. The experiment reported here contributes to the growing evidence against scalar uniformity, while also exploring the suggestion of Van Tiel, Van Miltenburg, Zevakhina, and Guerts, (2014) of the role of boundedness in the observed variation. The current experiment utilizes a novel approach to exploring the interpretation of scalars, and also investigates the content of strengthened interpretations.

Local pragmatics in a Gricean framework, revisited: response to three commentaries

Abstract There are two central themes that occupy the commentaries, and hence this response. The first is the character and role of what is said, both in my account, and in pragmatic theory in general. In response, I lay out in more detail the proposal from my original paper that the starting point for Gricean reasoning should be not what is said, but the pragmatically uncommitted what is expressed. As part of this argument, I restate and provide further arguments for my claim that global and local pragmatic effects are continuous. The second central theme of the commentaries concerns the value of a Gricean account, which is not intended to model the psychological processes of interpretation. I respond to this concern in Section 5, ‘Pragmatics, psychology and processing’.