RE: RT list: the projection problem for presuppositions

Thanks to Nick for a very useful posting on this. In my book, Assertion (ch.7), I consider presuppositions from a pragmatic perspective, drawing on Potts (2005) and Wilson & Sperber (1979). In a nutshell, I argue that there are grammatical means of indicating where the point of an assertion lies and that entailments that are not indicated as having 'pointhood' exhibit presuppositional characteristics. This is, of course, essentially the claim made by Wilson & Sperber (1979), and I cash out 'pointhood' in terms of Wilson & Sperber's notion of entailments being relevant in their own right (i.e. serving as premises in the derivation of contextual implications).

Regards

Mark

Refs

Potts, C. (2005). The logic of conventional implicatures. OUP.
Wilson, D. and D. Sperber (1979). Ordered entailments: An alternative to presupposition theories. Syntax and semantics: presupposition. C.-K. Oh and D. Dinneen. London, Academic Press. 11: 299-323.

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Received on Mon Feb 28 15:41:27 2011