Presuppositions in Context (5-6 July 2012)

Presupposition is the phenomenon where certain entailments of a sentence do not behave as expected when the sentence is embedded in a larger sentential context. For example, "John does not know that his wife is cheating on him" implies that indeed John’s wife is cheating on him, despite the fact that the sentence is negated. Because of their curious properties, presuppositions have been at the center of attention in both linguistics and philosophy in the past 40+ years, giving rise to numerous theoretical approaches and analyses.

Central questions of the workshop will concern some of the following issues: What types of presupposition triggering expressions are there and what are their distinguishing properties? How do pragmatic factors influence the appearance of presuppositions, and how do the properties of presuppositions change in context? What formal and theoretical tools can accurately capture the interaction between context and presuppositions? Can the phenomenon of presupposition be reduced to or explained by general cognitive mechanisms? How do presuppositions interact with conversational implicatures?

The workshop was initiated by Dr. Márta Abrusán (Fellow 2011/12).