Projection or Admittance? Presupposition Accommodation and the Karttunen Calculus
Yoad Winter
January 2025
 

This paper examines two approaches to presuppositions: one viewing them as inferences projecting from sentences under negation and other logical operators, and another defining them as admittance conditions of utterances. Neither approach fully accounts for the `proviso problem', which arises when a sentence's presuppositional inferences are logically stronger than its necessary admittance conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a calculus of a trivalent logic that formally distinguishes between admittance and projection, extending Karttunen's dynamic, logical form-based analysis. The resulting framework enables a simple pragmatic strategy: presuppositional conclusions are accommodated unless overridden by a contextually likelier admittance condition. We provide evidence that this approach is empirically superior to methods that address the proviso problem using pragmatic strengthening.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/008759
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Linguistics and Philosophy (forthcoming)
keywords: presupposition; admittance; inference; formal semantics; proviso problem; accommodation, semantics
previous versions: v1 [January 2025]
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