Grice, Presupposition and Conversational Implicature: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

Speranza

Commentary on C. Cummins, P. Amaral, & N. Katsos, "Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers".

Herbert Paul Grice was WELL AWARE that Sir Peter Frederick Strawson's misnotion of "presupposition" was a misnomer. As evidence of this, Grice would show how Strawson was unfamiliar with what right word to use. In "On referring", Strawson keeps using "implies"!

i.e.

"The King of France is NOT bald" IMPLIES that there is a King of France.

----

Grice had been using "implies" in similar fashions by then. The last straw (by Strawson) was his "Introduction to Logical Theory", where he presupposes a lot of what some call "nonsense" referring to the simplest connective like "if". It was Grice's turn to build a stronger defense of the "Ordinary Man" against philosophical concoctions like Strawson's. Hence his idea of conversational implicature.

In the 1989 (posthumous) collection of essays, however repetitive, Herbert Paul Grice had occasion to repeat the claim in his famous ('infamous' for Strawsonians and neo-Strawsonians like Noel Burton-Roberts) essay, "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature", which should REALLY read as: "Presupposition IS Conversational Imlpicature".

The behaviour of so-called "presupposition triggers" in human language has been
extensively studied and given rise to many distinct theoretical proposals.
One intuitively appealing way of characterising presupposition is to
argue that it constitutes backgrounded meaning, which does not
contribute to updating the conversational record, and consequently may
not be challenged or refuted by discourse participants. However, there
are a wide range of presupposition triggers, some of which can
systematically be used to introduce new information. Is there, then, a
clear psychological distinction between presupposition and assertion?
Do certain expressions vacillate between presupposing and asserting
information? And is information backgrounding a categorical or a
gradient phenomenon? In this paper we argue for the value of
experimental methods in addressing these questions, and present a pilot
study demonstrating backgrounding effects of presupposition triggers,
and suggesting their gradience in nature. We discuss the implications of
these findings for theoretical categorisations of presupposition triggers.
Keywords: presuppositions; accommodation; experimental pragmatics;
information structure; QUD.


In conversation, information is exchanged in several different ways. One
dimension of variation concerns the foregrounding and backgrounding of
information. A speaker may introduce information that is available for the other
conversational participants to accept or reject, and at the same time introduce
other information that is in some sense ‘taken for granted’, which is typically
not available for discussion. The former class of information is considered
“foregrounded” and the latter “backgrounded”.
Natural languages provide various devices to allow speakers to manipulate
information structure in this way. These include lexical items such as stop,
only, manage, again, and so on; and syntactic devices such as cleft
constructions. For example, the speaker of (1) is understood to foreground the
prediction that Balotelli will start the match (a point that invites potential
disagreement), while describing him in the backgrounded content as an
“outstanding striker” (in a way that does not invite disagreement). Similarly,
the speaker of (2) foregrounds the prediction that Balotelli will be sent off,
backgrounding the information that this has happened before.
(1) Balotelli, who is an outstanding striker, will start the match.
(2) Balotelli will be sent off again.
From a theoretical perspective (both philosophical and linguistic), various
attempts have been made to characterise the difference between the
foregrounded and backgrounded content of sentences. One influential
approach asserts that the foregrounded meaning is that which contributes to
context update (Stalnaker, 1976; Lewis, 1979) and addresses the Question
Under Discussion (QUD; Roberts, 1996). However, the appropriate
treatment of backgrounded content is relatively unclear, due to a great extent
to the heterogeneity of this type of content.
From the perspective of experimental semantics and pragmatics, this issue
invites empirical attack. Despite the intuitively appealing nature of the
theoretical analysis, there is as yet little evidence that the distinction between
foregrounded and backgrounded content is a psychologically real one for
native speakers of a language. In particular, one might question whether these
are the appropriate levels of description, or whether the heterogeneity of
backgrounded content is also reflected at a psycholinguistic level. We can
consider whether types of linguistic content that admit a unified theoretical
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 3
analysis also exhibit a comparable level of unity when they are used to elicit
behavioural data from linguistically untrained participants (and conversely
whether theoretically distinctive materials yield unexpectedly similar
behavioural signatures). We wish to know, broadly speaking, whether the
various ways of manipulating information structure (distinguished from one
another on theoretical or philosophical grounds) actually differ from one
another at a psychological or behavioural level.
Recent work in experimental pragmatics has attempted to apply some of the
psycholinguistic techniques used in research on implicature (Bott & Noveck,
2004, among many others) to the problem of information structure. In
particular, attention has focused on presupposition triggers, with respect both
to their ability to background information and their ability to “project”
semantic content. This study examines the former attribute, but both are
discussed in the following section.

1. Presupposition phenomena in
experimental semantics and pragmatics
Lexical items such as again, stop, and so on are customarily analysed as
presupposition triggers. These have two distinctive properties: first, as
discussed above, they tend to signal the presence of further meaningful content
(the “presupposition”), additional to the main declarative meaning of the
sentence, but intuitively less available for further discussion, e.g. for direct
refutation. Secondly, unlike other forms of additional meaning such as (most)
implicatures, presuppositions survive embedding under negation and other
operators among the “family of sentences” tests (Chierchia & McConnell-
Ginet, 1990), while the declarative meaning does not. If we negate (2), as in
(3), the presupposition (that Balotelli has been sent off in the past) remains
intact. This is referred to as the presupposition “projecting” from under the
scope of negation.
(3) Balotelli will not be sent off again.
These two properties have given rise to rich sets of competing theoretical
proposals. With respect to projection, the question arises of how the
presuppositions of a complex sentence are calculable from the presuppositions
of the component sentences. At least two classes of theories have been
advanced to account for this: the dynamic semantic approach advanced by
Heim (1983) and Van der Sandt (1992) aims to explain projection in terms of
semantic composition, while the pragmatic approach endorsed by Schlenker
(2008) appeals to principles of conversational organisation.
The involvement of experimental work in addressing this question parallels
the developments in the study of scalar implicature over the past 10 years. As
in that case, competing theories can no longer be evaluated on the basis of
introspection, as there is little controversy about the ultimate interpretation of
the examples under discussion (Katsos & Cummins, 2010). The theories are
instead distinguishable by the fact that they posit different processes, and
therefore make distinctive predictions about the time-course of processing.
For instance, in a case such as (4), it is not controversial that the
presupposition (5) does not ultimately project, but it is also not introspectively
clear whether the presupposition is calculated and then cancelled, or simply
not calculated.

(4) I didn’t know that whales are fish, because whales are not
fish.

(5) Whales are fish.

For similar reasons, experimental work has recently commenced on the
question of how presuppositions are backgrounded. An intuition is broadly
shared in the literature that presupposed content is generally not addressable:
that is, it is not possible for an interlocutor straightforwardly to object to a
presupposition. Instead, infelicitous presuppositions must be dealt with in a
more metalinguistic way, e.g. by objecting to the utterance as a whole. This
observation underlies the “Hey, wait a minute” test (Shanon, 1976; von Fintel,
2004). This test is proposed on the basis that presuppositions not in the
common ground can be challenged as in (6), while assertions not in the
common ground cannot.

(6) A: John realised that whales are fish.

B: Hey, wait a minute! Whales are not fish.
*B: Hey, wait a minute! John didn’t realise that.
However, the “Hey, wait a minute” test may not be the most sensitive
diagnostic for presupposition per se ; it seems felicitous to use “Hey, wait a
minute” to object to any precondition of the utterance, no matter how obscure
(and perhaps even to an aspect of foregrounded meaning, if it is particularly
surprising). Moreover, there are good reasons to suppose that the delineation
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 5
of backgrounded and foregrounded content is not entirely straightforward.
First, presuppositions differ in their logical relation to the content of the
sentence (Zeevat, 1992), which could have implications for their
addressability. Second, many researchers have observed differences in the
family of presupposition triggers, e.g. between “soft” and “hard” triggers
(Abusch, 2010), or have proposed a continuum ranging from structural “hardcore”
triggers like clefts to “heavily context-dependent presuppositions” not
associated with any particular trigger (Kadmon, 2001). Third, presuppositions
can be exploited to convey information in an assertion-like fashion, i.e. to
introduce new information through accommodation (Lewis, 1979; Von Fintel,
2000). Consequently, the relation between the two aspects of presupposition
discussed above – the potential for presuppositional content to project, and its
tendency to be informationally backgrounded – is not a trivial one.
We discuss these issues in the following subsections of this paper, and then
proceed to motivate and discuss a pilot study that aims to investigate the
typology of presupposition triggers with respect to their backgrounding
behaviour. In this case, the broad justification for experimental work is that
subtle gradations in the acceptability of forms may exist but not be available to
introspection. Our aim is to test the psychological reality of the distinctions
that are posited.
2. Resolution and lexical triggers

Zeevat (1992) observed that presupposition triggers could be categorised into
three broad classes, differing in the extent to which they are anaphoric
(following Van der Sandt 1988). One class of triggers, including for instance
definite descriptions, “collect entities from the environment in order to say
new things about them” (Zeevat, 1992, p. 397). By analogy with the process of
anaphora resolution, these are referred to as resolution triggers . The second
class of triggers, termed lexical triggers by Zeevat, are lexical items that encode
preconditions for their main declarative content. Stop and continue both have
this property: in (7) and (8), it is logically necessary that John smoked at some
point prior to the time of utterance.
(7) John stopped smoking.
(8) John continues to smoke.

The third class, typified by too and again, is also anaphoric, in that it
involves the retrieval of an entity or eventuality previously salient in the
discourse. Deviating from Zeevat’s use of the term, we will consider these also
to be “resolution triggers”. Note in particular that the backgrounded content
of such items is typically unrelated, logically speaking, to the foregrounded
content. For instance, in (2) and (3), the backgrounded content (that Balotelli
was sent off at some time in the past) neither entails nor is entailed by the
foregrounded content (Balotelli being sent off in the past is neither a necessary
nor a sufficient condition for him to be sent off in the future). Contrastingly, in
(7) and (8) the relation between foregrounded and backgrounded content is
closer, as each may only end or prolong a preceding eventuality.
It is theoretically coherent to assume that all these categories of
presuppositions behave in the same way, in respect of the foregrounding and
backgrounding of information. However, intuitively, there appear to be
important differences as regards the addressability of the presupposed content.
For the resolution triggers, denial of the backgrounded content does not
provide any information about the foregrounded content. For the lexical
triggers, denial of the backgrounded content amounts to denying the truth of
the statement as a whole. Therefore, it should be possible to address the
presupposed content while at the same time addressing the QUD, in Roberts’s
(1996) terms1.
The question of whether there are psychologically real differences between
the treatment of resolutional and lexical triggers by native speakers is an
empirical one. A binary judgment such as the “Hey, wait a minute” test
obviously does not distinguish different levels of backgrounding. From an
experimental point of view, this suggests a role for a gradient acceptability
judgement task, such as we use in the pilot study presented later in this paper2.
3. Different strengths of presupposition trigger
Several strands of research on presupposition share the intuition that there are
further systematic differences that are not necessarily coterminous with the
1 Note that to Roberts, addressing the QUD involves entailing an answer to it, but no
stipulation is made as to how direct this entailment relation must be.
2 We avoid using the “Hey, wait a minute” test in conjunction with a gradient judgment task,
as there is a risk that the judgments will reflect the acceptability of using this particular kind of
objection in different contexts, rather than being a direct measure of backgrounding.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 7
above classes. Kadmon (2001) argues for a continuum of presuppositions,
based on their projection behaviour (and specifically considerations such as
cancellability and context-dependence). Von Fintel and Matthewson (2008)
consider certain triggers, such as too and again, to be more strongly
presuppositional than others. They situate this observation in the context of
research by Abusch (see Abusch, 2010), proposing a distinction between
“soft” and “hard” presupposition triggers, and Simons (2006), who argues
that too and again serve no purpose within the sentence other than triggering a
presupposition (which suggests that their presence should be a reliable cue to
the presupposition being intended by the speaker).
It is tempting to interpret this as a prediction that the strongest
presupposition triggers should have the most pronounced backgrounding
effects. However, this may be a misinterpretation. In fact, one might argue
instead that the use of a sentence that goes out of its way explicitly to convey a
presupposition should render that presupposition more addressable, in that its
importance is heightened by comparison with the declarative content of the
sentence.
Once again, the role of experimental work here is to discern whether the
intuitions of theoreticians have a psychological reality. We share the intuition
that the class of presuppositions is diverse, both in respect of the nature of the
material presupposed and in the extent to which that material is made
cognitively salient, and consider that information structure is a useful measure
of this. Our hope in this respect is that findings about the nature of
backgrounding may enable us to help further refine the typology of
presupposition triggers that has been proposed in the theoretical literature.
4. Exploiting accommodation
Another aspect of presupposition behaviour is that presuppositions can be
used to convey additional information. When a sentence felicitously
presupposes information that is not taken for granted in the context, that
information is said to be accommodated (Lewis, 1979, drawing upon the work
of Stalnaker 1976 i.a.). The possibility of exploiting accommodation to convey
new information further blurs the distinction between foregrounded and
backgrounded content. Consider for example (9).
(9) I just found out that John is having an affair.
8 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
In terms of information structure, this sentence declares the fact of
discovery (‘I just found out that p’) and presupposes the proposition ‘John is
having an affair’3. However, intuitively, sentences such as (9) can also be used
to assert the propositional content that appears to be presupposed. Moreover,
felicitous responses to (9) appear more naturally to address that proposition
than the overt declarative (“He isn’t!” seems a more likely response than “You
didn’t!”) In short, the presupposition does not appear to be backgrounded to
any appreciable extent in such a construction.
Conversely, presuppositions can in principle be exploited to convey
information that is controversial, with a view to adding this information to the
common ground or causing the hearers to update their situation model
accordingly. This is exploited in loaded questions, such as the classic example
(10), where either a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response can be taken to endorse the
presupposition of ‘stop’. Unlike examples such as (9), however, this technique
exploits the fact that the presupposition is backgrounded, and is therefore
difficult to address.
(10) Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
A general question here relates to how regularly speakers intend
presuppositions to be accommodated: here we might make competing
theoretical observations. On the one hand, the use of a presupposition is
informationally redundant unless it goes to updating the situation model of the
interlocutors in some way4. We might therefore expect that non-lexical
triggers are canonically used to convey new information of some kind (e.g.
again to convey explicitly that the event under discussion has happened
before). On the other hand, if it is crucial that new information should be added
to the interlocutors’ situation model, it might appear uncooperative for a
speaker to convey this information in the form of a presupposition, where it
cannot be easily contested if it is controversial, and where it might conceivably
be overlooked entirely. This raises the very broad and much-discussed issue of
how a speaker most efficiently conveys information to a hearer, and the specific
question of how presuppositions enter into this process.
3
This is assumed to be a presupposition based on projection, specifically that “I didn’t just
realise John is having an affair” also conveys that he is.
4
This might include bringing already known information more immediately to the attention of
the interlocutor.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 9
For the purpose of this research, the crucial point here is that the role of
presupposition triggers in backgrounding information is potentially
negotiable. It appears quite possible for theoretically similar constructions
either to background the presupposition or to foreground it at the expense of
the declarative content. This suggests that we should also be interested in caseby-
case variation among instances of identical triggers, as well as being
concerned with the patterns that arise across the class(es) of triggers.
5. Foregrounded and backgrounded presuppositions:
a pilot experimental study
In our pilot study, we aimed to investigate the extent to which a set of
presupposition triggers accomplish the backgrounding of their corresponding
presuppositions. We selected as a sample of triggers the resolutional again,
and the lexical stop and continue. We also considered only, a trigger with
debatable status (presupposition or entailment; cf. Horn, 1969; 1996,
Roberts to appear); and a syntactic resolution trigger, the comparative
construction, using which for instance the sentence (11) presupposes (12)5.
(11) Jane is a better doctor than Mike.
(12) Mike is a doctor.
5.1. Methodology
Participants were presented with question-answer (Q-A) pairs and asked to
rate, on a 1-5 scale, “how natural” the answer was. Response latencies were
also measured and recorded. In the critical items, a presupposition trigger
appears in the question, and the question was answered in the negative. In the
“Foreground” condition, the negative answer addressed the foregrounded
content of the question, as in (13); in the “Background” condition, the
negative answer addressed the backgrounded content of the question, as in
(14).
(13) Q: Did Julia stop smoking?
A: No, she smokes.
5
This also projects from under the scope of negation: “Jane isn’t a better doctor than Mike”
conveys that Mike is a doctor.
10 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
(14) Q: Did Julia stop smoking?
A: No, she didn’t use to smoke.
For each trigger, two Q-A pairs were administered to each subject. Two
versions of the experiment were constructed, such that the items presented in
the Foreground condition in version 1 were presented in the Background
condition in version 2, and vice versa. The experiment was implemented in EPrime.
Participants (n=30) were native English speakers, recruited from the
student body of the University of Cambridge, and were allocated randomly to
either version 1 or version 2 of the experiment.
5.2. Predictions
Our general predictions are as follows. If native speakers are sensitive to the
distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded information in
discourse, Q-A pairs in the Foreground condition should receive higher
naturalness ratings than those in the Background condition. Moreover, under
the assumption that backgrounded information is harder to retrieve, we would
predict a slowdown in response time (while we measure response time of the
judgment, admittedly a more natural measure would be response time of the
reading time of the critical segment). Comparing the resolutional to the lexical
triggers, we would expect the acceptability of negating backgrounded
information in the latter case to be higher than in the former case, as for lexical
triggers the presupposition is entailed by the declarative content of the
sentence, and therefore its failure is sufficient reason to give a felicitous
negative response to the sentence.
5.3. Results
Results for the triggers continue, stop and only are as follows. As the materials
with again and the comparative gave rise to unintended ambiguities in one test
condition in this pilot study6, we are unable to report counterbalanced results
for these triggers. The following results are based upon each participant’s
6
The problematic sentences described two individuals of the same gender; in these cases, as
well as a reading of ‘he’ or ‘she’ in which the presupposition was contested, there was a
possible reading in which the declarative content was contested.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 11
rating of two items for each trigger, both with either foreground continuations
(for 15 participants) or background continuations (for the other 15).
Trigger Mean rating (SD) Mean response time, ms (SD)
Foreground Background Foreground Background
Again 4.13 (0.97) 2.87 (1.11) 4509 (2906) 4052 (3268)
comparative 4.37 (1.00) 2.60 (0.77) 3460 (2006) 4464 (3080)
These preliminary results show that, as predicted, refutations in foreground
conditions are preferred to those in background conditions for each type of
presupposition trigger. Paired t-tests applied to the counterbalanced
conditions reveal a highly significant preference in judgements for foreground
rather than background conditions (all p < 0.001). Similar planned
comparisons using paired t-tests for response times also show a preference for
foreground conditions over background (continue, t = 1.68, p < 0.05; stop, t
= 2.40, p < 0.01; only , t = 3.55, p < 0.001; all one-tailed).
Between triggers, comparisons show a significant preference in the
background condition for only versus stop (t = 3.46, p < 0.001 two-tailed) and
for only versus continue (t = 3.08, p < 0.01 two-tailed). However, these
preferences are also significant in the foreground condition, as is the
preference for continue versus stop which does not approach significance in
the background condition (only versus stop, t = 5.48, p < 0.001 two-tailed;
only versus continue, t = 2.77, p < 0.01 two-tailed; continue versus stop, t =
2.70, p < 0.01 two-tailed). Each of these comparisons remains significant at p
< 0.05 with a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons.
Note that the reaction times exhibit a great deal of variability, possibly
because these also include reading times. There is a numerical preference for
foreground conditions; the exception is again, but this may reflect the failure to
counterbalance materials in this condition.
5.4. Discussion
The results of this pilot study demonstrate that native speakers are sensitive to
the distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded information, and that
this is accessible to a methodology involving naturalness ratings of dialogue
fragments. Conditions in which backgrounded information was refuted were
12 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
perceived as less felicitous than those in which foregrounded information was
refuted. For the counterbalanced test items, foreground conditions also
yielded significantly faster response times. This suggests that the retrieval of
backgrounded information, which is not being used actively to update the
conversational record, may result in additional processing load.
There is also considerable variability between triggers as to the
acceptability of refuting backgrounded content. Our results suggest that this is
significantly easier in the case of only than continue or stop, with again and the
comparative construction yielding numerically intermediate acceptability
ratings. This might be taken as support for the psychological reality of the
distinction between resolution and lexical triggers.
Two important caveats must be taken into account, however, in attempting
to interpret these findings. First, as discussed above, the status of the prejacent
of only (e.g. the proposition John went to the library in the sentence Only John
went to the library ) is a theoretically-contested issue. The acceptability ratings
of only in the background condition could be interpreted as providing support
for the view that the prejacent is an entailment of only (cf. Horn, 1996 and
Roberts, to appear).
Secondly, and more problematically, the differences that were manifest in
the Background conditions were also exhibited in the Foreground conditions,
in violation of our expectations. This renders any conclusion about the relative
behaviour of the presupposition triggers in this experiment necessarily very
tentative. It could be that the apparent disparity between these conditions is
attributable simply to the materials in question varying in felicity, which might
apply to both experimental conditions. An alternative conjecture is that the
Foreground materials were not optimally felicitous because it is more natural
to respond to a presupposition-triggering question with a response that also
acknowledges the presupposition than with one that does not: compare for
instance (15) and (16). In this case, the infelicity of the Foreground items
might be independent of the Background items, and thus would not invalidate
the comparison between presupposition triggers discussed above.
(15) Q: Did Julia give up smoking?
A: ?No, she smokes.
(16) Q: Did Julia give up smoking?
A: No, she still smokes.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 13
In our ongoing work, we are addressing this issue, with a view to obtaining
a suitable baseline for comparing the backgrounding behaviour of
presuppositions (by constructing refutations that are reliably judged to be
entirely felicitous).
6. General discussion and future directions
In this paper, we have aimed to give show the potential of experimental work to
shed light on theoretically-contested aspects of information structure in
general, and presupposition in particular. It must be acknowledged that this is
a complex phenomenon, as witnessed both by the extensive theoretical
literature and the relatively late development of experimental approaches to the
problem. The above pilot study illustrates both some of the potential of
empirical work to demonstrate the psychological reality of the distinctions
posited by theoreticians, and some of the difficulties encountered in
attempting to operationalise these distinctions in a meaningful way. Our study
illustrates the difficulty in isolating presuppositions from other types of
content in actual interpretation, and the individual variability among
presupposition triggers that seems to elude neat theoretical groupings.
Empirical work in this field has the potential to throw light on whether the
classes of presuppositions posited in some approaches (e.g. Zeevat, 1992) are
coherent, or whether it is more appropriate to situate presuppositions on a
continuum (as in Kadmon, 2001). In either case, a further question concerns
the status of presupposition phenomena as a potential semantic universal (cf.
Von Fintel & Matthewson, 2008). The results from experimental research
have shown that fine-grained judgements about types of presupposed content
cannot be obtained solely from introspection. On the surface, it appears that
presuppositions can take many different forms and be related to the declarative
content of their triggering sentences in various different ways. If it is true that
presuppositions can be organised cross-linguistically into a small set of natural
kinds with a consistent behaviour, that is potentially instructive for our view of
conversational interaction and indeed cognition. We hope to contribute to the
cross-linguistic empirical examination of presupposition and information
backgrounding in future work.
We also hope to unify this work with research on some of the other open
questions about presupposition discussed in this paper. For instance,
presupposition projection is plausibly linked to information backgrounding:
14 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
we have seen how information may be presented at different levels of
‘grounding’ in order to achieve particular cognitive effects. The question of
how this aspect of information structure is used to influence the interlocutor’s
situation model does not appear to have been tackled in any generality.
Nevertheless, there is a strong and widely-shared intuition that
presuppositions may be used to introduce information into the discourse. By
better understanding how presupposition triggers are processed by speaker
and hearer, we will better be able to offer an account of the role of
presupposition in efficient communication. Appeal to experimental data
should enable research in this field to proceed within a constrained and
tractable hypothesis space.

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