Semantics circle: Parasuppositions

Abstract

We introduce a new class of linguistic inferences, 'parasuppositions', triggered by diverse constructions, notably appositive participles (e.g. Ann drinks, taking enormous risks), but also post-speech gestures — e.g. Ann drinks – DRINK, where DRINK is a gestural representation of drinking; and parenthetical conjuncts q of the form p (and q) — e.g. Ann drinks (and takes enormous risks). With special reference to French, we show that parasuppositions give rise to projection patterns reminiscent of presuppositions: Ann might smoke, taking enormous risks yields the inference that if Ann smokes, she takes enormous risks. These projection patterns suggest that parasuppositions must be locally trivial (= entailed by their local context). But parasuppositions differ from presuppositions in two key respects: they are informative, and they are typically deviant under not and under none-type quantifiers. While some appositive relative clauses (ARCs) might well trigger parasuppositions, our target constructions differ from ARCs in being preferentially interpreted in situ, and thus they do not display the 'wide scope behavior' of ARCs. To explain the target behavior, we propose that parasupposition triggers must be entailed by their speaker's local context, computed on the basis of their linguistic environment combined with the speaker's beliefs (rather than with the common ground). We explain their deviance under not and none by the fact that in such environments they make a trivial contribution: Nobody smokes, taking enormous risks triggers two inferences, namely Nobody smokes, and Everyone who smokes takes enormous risks. But the second component is trivially true because of the first component, and the sentence has a simpler equivalent alternative, namely Nobody smokes. Our analysis raises broader questions about the full typology of presupposition-like phenomena in language, and of their derivation.

Link to the paper: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009828 

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