Presupposition Triggering Reflects Pragmatic Reasoning About Utterance Utility

EasyChair Preprint 9409

Abstract

Theories of presupposition triggering must contend with defeasibility and context sensitivity of projective inferences arising from the diverse class of soft triggers. This work presents a pragmatic account of triggering, building off notions of utterance utility from the Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framework: We propose that the likelihood of accommodation of projective content p is correlated with the degree to which attributing prior belief of p to the speaker increases the utility of their utterance. This proposal captures the basic facts, and generates novel predictions about the gradience of some projective inferences.

Keyphrases: Rational Speech Acts, Triggering, gradience, presupposition, utility

@booklet{EasyChair:9409,
  author    = {Alex Warstadt},
  title     = {Presupposition Triggering Reflects Pragmatic Reasoning About Utterance Utility},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 9409},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}