RT list: the projection problem for presuppositions

I recently attended a lecture on the subject of the "projection problem
for presuppositions." (What that is, I'll describe briefly below.)

This topic has for decades occupied the attention of various
researchers, including Stalnaker, Karttunen, Peters, Heim, and Soames,
and in the last few years a number of papers have appeared by Fox,
Chemla, and Schlenker. It's under busy current discussion.

My question is, have Relevance Theory researchers weighed in on this
topic? Is there a contribution to be made? I don't see works by
recognizable relevance theorists cited in articles on this subject. Yet
it has a lot to do with the pragmatics of utterance interpretation,
boundaries between presuppositions/implicatures/explicatures,
cancellability, and (in RT terms) mutual manifestness.

Cheers,

Hanno Beck
USA & Germany

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The Project Problem for Presuppositions -- how might we predict or
calculate the presuppositions of complex sentences based at least partly
on the presuppositions of their parts.

For a basic example (from Heim 1990):

(a) If the king has a son, the king's son is bald.

The two clauses that build this sentence:

(b) The king has a son.
(c) The king's son is bald.

have fairly clear presuppositions ("there is a king" and "there is a
king and the king has a son"), but what exactly does sentence (a)
presuppose, and if we agree on what (a) presupposes, how do we predict
that in general?

In the literature, further examples abound where presuppositions
embodied in various types of complex sentences seem weirdly, or even
inconsistently, related to the presuppositions of constituent clauses.

New approaches have been offered and debated, particularly in the last
three years.

Heim, I.: 1990, Presupposition Projection. In R. van der Sandt (ed.),
Reader for the Nijmegen Workshop on Presupposition, Lexical Meaning, and
Discourse Processes. U. of Nijmegen.
Received on Sat Feb 26 19:10:43 2011