Presuppositions, implicatures, and contextual equivalence

Maximize Presupposition! (MP), as originally proposed in Heim (Semantik: Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, pp. 487–535, 1991) and developed in subsequent works, offers an account of the otherwise mysterious unassertability of a variety of sentences. At the core of MP is the idea that speakers are urged to use a sentence ψ over a sentence ϕ if ψ contributes the same new information as ϕ, yet carries a stronger presupposition. While MP has been refined in many ways throughout the years, most (if not all) of its formulations have retained this characterisation of the MP-competition. Recently, however, the empirical adequacy of this characterisation has been questioned in light of certain newly discovered cases that are infelicitous, despite meeting MP-competition conditions. This has led some researchers to broaden the scope of MP, extending it to competition between sentences which are not contextually equivalent (Spector and Sudo in Linguistics and Philosophy 40(5):473–517, 2017) and whose presuppositions are not satisfied in the context (Anvari in Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 28, pp. 711–726, 2018; Manuscript, IJN-ENS, 2019). In this paper, we present a body of evidence showing that these formulations of MP are sometimes too liberal, sometimes too restrictive: they overgenerate infelicity for a variety of felicitous cases while leaving the infelicity of minimally different cases unaccounted for. We propose an alternative, implicature-based approach stemming from Magri (PhD dissertation, MIT, 2009), Meyer (PhD dissertation, MIT, 2013), and Marty (PhD dissertation, MIT, 2017), which reintroduces contextual equivalence and presupposition satisfaction in some form through the notion of relevance. This approach is shown to account for the classical and most of the novel cases. Yet some of the latter remain problematic for this approach as well. We end the paper with a systematic comparison of the different approaches to MP and MP-like phenomena, covering both the classical and the novel cases. All in all, the issue of how to properly restrict the competition for MP-like phenomena remains an important challenge for all accounts in the literature.

Children’s and Adults’ Sensitivity to Gricean Maxims and to the Maximize Presupposition Principle

Up to age 5, children are known to experience difficulties in the derivation of implicitly conveyed content, sticking to literally true, even if underinformative, interpretation of sentences. The computation of implicated meanings is connected to the (apparent or manifest) violation of Gricean conversational maxims. We present a study that tests unmotivated violations of the maxims of Quantity, Relevance, and Manner and of the Maximize Presupposition principle, with a Truth Value Judgment task with three options of response. We tested pre-schoolers and school-aged children, with adults as controls, to verify at which age these pragmatic rules are recognized and to see whether there is a difference among these tenets. We found an evolutionary trend and that, in all age groups, violations of the maxims of Quantity and of Relation are sanctioned to a higher degree compared to infringements of the Maim of Manner and of the Maximize Presupposition principle. We conjecture that this relates to the effects that the violation of a certain maxim or principle has on the goals of the exchange: listeners are less tolerant with statements that transmit inaccurate or incomplete information, while being more tolerant with those that still permit to understand what has happened.

Sich ausgehen: Actuality entailments and further notes from the perspective of an Austrian German motion verb construction

The paper contains notes for the processes of interpretation and language change starting out from the phenomenon that emerged from the motion verb gehen, ‘go’, joined by the reflexive and the particle aus, ‘out’ in Austrian German. An empirical case is primarily made that the constructions if fully implicative. Furthermore, it is suggested that concepts such as Maximize Presupposition and co-development in contact can be useful tools in the equipment of researchers working on semantic change. Finally, a methodological point is suggested towards bridging synchronic and historical data collection processes.

Logical Integrity

Building on previous literature I argue that the principle Maximize Presupposition! as standardly conceived is too permissive in that it sanctions certain utterances that are intuitively infelicitous. I propose as an alternative to MP a novel principle called Logical Integrity and I showed that while LI makes the same prediction as MP for the basic cases it is restrictive enough to account for the problematic cases discussed. Furthermore, I argue that LI without further ado make interesting predictions for a novel type of example, the cases discussed in Magri (2009), and Hurford's Constraint. Finally, I discuss and defused one potential counter-example to LI.

On competing degree morphemes in verbs of change in Southern Aymara

In this paper, I address verbal predicates of change in Southern Aymara, an understudiedAndean language. I concentrate on verbs that are derived with the suffix -cha. Thissuffix derives degree achievements and creation predicates. I propose that they should be analyzeduniformly as degree achievements. The main empirical point of this paper is that thereare two degree morphemes that combine with verbs with -cha, namely, a covert positive morphemev.POS and an overt suffix -su. The latter is a degree morpheme that restricts the standardof comparison to lexical or contextual maximal degrees. I propose an analysis in terms of MaximizePresupposition: v.POS and -su constitute lexical alternatives where the latter is preferredover the former when maximal values are reached. v.POS is thus felicitous when no maximumis reached. The discussion bears on how telicity is achieved cross-linguistically when degreeachievements are considered, thus enriching our typologies on the topic.Keywords: degree achievement, creation predicate, telicity, Maximize Presupposition, Aymara.

Presuppositional implicatures: quantity or maximize presupposition?

Schlenker (2012) proposes that when framed within a modern Stalnakerian view ofpresupposition and common ground (Stalnaker, 1998, 2002), Maximize Presupposition! (Heim,1991; Sauerland, 2008) can be viewed as a special case of the maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975).We provide data suggesting that in some cases, Maximize Presupposition! applies even whenspeakers are not expected to use a presupposition as vectors of new information. We arguethat these data support the view that Maximize Presupposition! is an independent pragmaticprinciple, distinct from Quantity.Keywords: maximize presupposition, quantity, presuppositional implicatures, scalar implicatures.