Abrusán (2011) PDF

Linguist and Philos (2011) 34:491–535
DOI 10.1007/s10988-012-9108-y
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers
Márta Abrusán
Published online: 1 May 2012

Ó The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers
arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence.
Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by
default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual
cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would
not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention to, be it by
default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts
to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e.
what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore
likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to
event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of
Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computa-
tional logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000).
Keywords Presuppositions Æ Attention Æ Soft triggers Æ Aboutness Æ

Lexical semantics of verbs Æ Factivity
1 Introduction
Most studies on presuppositions are concerned with the projection problem, i.e. the
question of how presuppositions of complex statements can be predicted from the
presuppositions of their parts. The question of why presuppositions arise to begin
with is a more rarely discussed issue, with much of the field being agnostic about the
problem. This paper aims to address this question in connection with so-called soft
presuppositional triggers.
M. Abrusán (&)
Lichtenberg Kolleg, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
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492 M. Abrusán
Besides the agnostic position, there are two main types of attitudes to the trig-
gering problem. The first answer is that presuppositions are just an arbitrary special
type of meaning specified by the lexicon, requiring their own set of rules for
combining with other elements when embedded in larger contexts. According to the
second view, suggested in passing by Stalnaker (1974) and also endorsed by Simons
(2001), Abusch (2010), Schlenker (2010), presuppositions might arise via pragmatic
means from assumptions about rules that rational interlocutors follow, just like
conversational implicatures.
Neither of the above approaches are satisfactory: the first approach is non-
explanatory and posits an enormous amount of complexity in the semantic system.
The second approach is theoretically attractive, however it is fair to say that to this
date no satisfactory mechanism has been given that can derive based on rational
rules of conversation why certain aspects of the meaning (and not others) are turned
into presuppositions. Further, psycholinguistic studies such as Chemla and Bott
(2011) that measured reaction times of speakers when computing presuppositions
that arise with factive verbs have found that these phenomena show different pat-
terns of processing than would be expected if they were computed similarly to
implicatures.
But there is also an alternative angle of looking at presuppositions. According to
this, rather than being a special aspect of the semantic meaning or conversational
implicatures, presuppositions arise as a phenomenon of attention that modulates the
process of understanding an utterance. This idea was already implicit in the well-
known observation that presuppositions expose a figure-background structuring of
the information conveyed by the sentence, where the asserted part corresponds to
the figure, or the main point of the sentence, and the presupposition corresponds
to the background, i.e. what is taken for granted by the speakers (cf. Stalnaker 1974;
Karttunen and Peters 1979; Wilson and Sperber 1979; Soames 1989; Chierchia and
McConnell-Ginet 2000). Approximately the same idea has also been taken up—in
various theoretical incarnations—in some more recent work as well (see Abbott
2000; Simons et al. 2010; Abrusán 2011).
This paper attempts to predict how presuppositions of soft triggers arise from
general rules of attention, i.e. how our minds structure and process large amounts of
information. In doing so, I am inspired by studies in cognitive psychology and
computational vision (e.g. Goldstein 2009; Itti and Koch 2001; Navalpakkam and
Itti 2005, etc.). These studies show that we unconsciously group information in a
scene into what forms a constitutive aspect of it and what is backgrounded. The
mechanisms of visual attention are widely believed to operate at two distinct levels:
There is a default (bottom-up) process of attention, and a task-driven, context
sensitive (top-down) mechanism for attention, where the latter has a role in mod-
ulating what is selected as the main aspect of the scene that we perceive. This paper
starts from the hypothesis that understanding the information conveyed by linguistic
means, and in particular the presuppositions of soft triggers follow from the same
rules and mechanisms of cognition that were uncovered in vision research.
According to this, language understanding is sensitive to both bottom-up
(default) mechanisms, as well as top-down (task-driven) factors that influence
attention: the former appear as the default grammatical constraints and tendencies of
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Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers 493
interpretation, and the latter as contextual influences, derived from the background
context and the aims and goals of interlocutors.
The need for this dichotomy is shown most clearly by the behavior of so-called
soft triggers. I assume that the class of soft triggers is the class of presuppositional
verbs, more precisely, I take soft triggers to be the class of presuppositions that can
be traced back to the presence of some verb in the sentence.1 The presuppositions of
such triggers are fairly easily suspendable in context, as was pointed out by
Karttunen (1971b), Stalnaker (1974), Gazdar (1979), van der Sandt (1992), Chier-
chia and McConnell-Ginet (2000), Simons (2001), Beaver (2004), Abbott (2006),
Romoli (2011), among others. For example, as Beaver (2004) observes, (1b), but not
(1a) suggests that the student has plagiarized his work:
(1) a. If the TA discovers that [your work is plagiarized]F , I will be [forced to
notify the Dean]F .
b. If the TA [discovers]F that your work is plagiarized, I will be [forced to
notify the Dean]F .
I start from the assumption that that presuppositions are inferences that are not
about the main point. In order to deal with facts such as (1), we need a two-tier
framework for predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers. There is a gram-
matically defined main point (which roughly, is given by those entailments that are
by nature about the event time of the matrix predicate of S), and a secondary,
pragmatic main point, which can be derived by markers such as focus and evidential
expressions (and possibly other factors as well). The grammatically and the con-
textually defined main point might be different: In these cases, sentences have two
main points that are relevant for presupposition triggering: the default (grammatical)
and a secondary (pragmatic) one. When this happens, entailments that are to be
presupposed have to be independent from both the default and the contextually
defined main point. This predicts, as we will see, that in the examples of presup-
position suspension such as (1a) no presupposition is triggered to begin with. Thus
we might view presuppositions of soft triggers as a result of how attention structures
the informational content of a sentence: bottom-up processes derive the grammat-
ically defined main point, while contextual (top-down) processes modulate what
becomes the main point in a given context.
This paper follows Stalnaker (1974) and some of the above mentioned authors in
assuming that presuppositions are also part of the entailed meaning: Presuppositions
are simply entailments that are in some way distinguished. Thus I will not attempt to
explain why expressions entail what they do, for example why knowledge entails
belief. What is proposed is only that given that such an entailment exists, there is a
way of telling whether or not it will also be presupposed. In this framework a
presupposition triggering mechanism can be viewed as a function that takes as its
input the bivalent meaning of a sentence S together with a context C, and outputs
one or more entailments of S (and in some cases contextual entailments of S), those
1
This is a slight departure from what is often assumed, as sometimes emotive factives such as regret are
classified among the hard triggers (Cf. e.g. Abbott 2006). See Sect. 5.1 for the reasons for this. Further,
I will not discuss presuppositions of questions and focus, nor sortal presuppositions.
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494 M. Abrusán
which are also presupposed.2 This paper only looks at unembedded sentences.
I assume that presuppositions of complex sentences are derived from the presup-
positions of atomic sentences they contain, via a separate projection mechanism.
A word of disclaimer: While the present proposal seems to make correct pre-
dictions in a large enough number of cases, it is most likely not complete: in
particular it is probable that further examples of top-down mechanisms that shift
attention (and thus presuppositions) will be uncovered. We are only beginning to
scratch the surface of this difficult topic.
2 Previous proposals
An intuition that has been around for quite some time now is that presuppositions
are the part of the content of the sentence that is in some sense ‘‘not the main point’’
of an utterance. E.g. Karttunen and Peters (1979, p. 1) define the presupposition of
sentences as ‘‘propositions which the sentences are not primarily about but which
have to be established prior to an utterance of the sentences in order for commu-
nication to go smoothly’’ (emphasis mine). Going one step further, Stalnaker (1974)
suggested that some presuppositions are indeed generated precisely in order to make
sure that an utterance does not make a heterogeneous contribution to the context, i.e.
to allow speakers to know what the main point of the utterance was.
It is clear that ‘‘x knows that P’’ entails that P. It is also clear that in most cases
when anyone asserts or denies that x knows that P, he presupposes that P. Can
this latter fact be explained without building it into the semantics of the word?
I think it can. Suppose a speaker were to assert that x knows that P in a context
where the truth of P is in doubt or dispute. He would be saying in one breath
something that could be challenged in two different ways. He would be
leaving unclear whether his main point was to make a claim about the truth of
P, or to make a claim about the epistemic situation of x (the knower), and thus
leaving unclear what direction he intended or expected the conversation to
take. Thus, given what ‘‘x knows that P’’ means, and given that people nor-
mally want to communicate in an orderly way, and normally have some
purpose in mind, it would be unreasonable to assert that x knows that P in such
a context. (Italics mine)
So Stalnaker suggests that presuppositions are generated in order to avoid uncer-
tainty as to what the main point of a speaker’s contribution to the context is.3 But
2
Another option would be a view of presuppositions under which they are not part of the entailed
meaning. In this case the triggering function would take as its input the ‘total’ meaning of S (call it
TM(S)), i.e. the meaning we get by lumping together truth conditional and presupposed content, and
output one or more entailment(s) of TM(S) as the presupposition. In this paper I use the Stalnakerian view
and assume that presuppositions are also entailed, but it should be borne in mind that the present proposal
is also compatible with a view of presuppositions where these are not entailed. Cf. Schlenker (2010) for a
more detailed discussion of how these two views compare from a perspective of a triggering theory.
3
Cf. also Abbott (2000) for a related idea. Abbott claims further that ‘‘[t]ypically, the asserted propo-
sition in an utterance will correspond to the main clause of the uttered sentence’’, but does not offer
further clarifications on this point.
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Stalnaker’s remark does not make a prediction as to which part of the assertion
should become the main point, and which should be presupposed (cf. Abusch 2010;
Schlenker 2008, 2010 for more discussion.)
2.1 Wilson and Sperber (1979)
Wilson and Sperber’s (1979) paper is the first proposal that attempts to explain why
certain entailments of sentences exhibit the special properties of presuppositions.4
Instead of assuming, as usual, that semantic entailments of a sentence are an
unordered set of propositions, they argue that this set is ordered by certain syntactic
and intonational factors. On the basis of this internal structure of entailments, they
set out to distinguish entailments that are focalized from those which are peripheral,
and within the first group, distinguish those which are in the foreground of attention
from those which are in the background. These linguistically determined distinc-
tions can then be used to predict the presuppositional behavior of utterances.
Let’s illustrate this with an example. The entailment of S that we get by
substituting the focused expression in S by an existentially quantified variable is its
first background entailment. First background entailments act as presuppositions. In
the case of (2a), where by assumption the complement of the attitude verb is
focused, the first background entailment is (2b):
(2) a. Susan knows [that it is raining]F

b. Susan knows something
c. It is raining
An entailment that neither entails nor is entailed by the first background entailment
is ‘not involved in normal interpretation’ (for our purposes: is presupposed). (2c) is
such an entailment and therefore it will act as a presupposition, at least in contexts
where the complement of the verb know is focused.
The proposal seems to make correct predictions for the presuppositions of focus
(if that is indeed what they are, cf. Geurts and van der Sandt (2004) and replies to it
in the same issue) and clefts. Wilson and Sperber also attempt to capture the
discourse sensitivity of presuppositions. Such effects have been recently discussed
in Beaver (2004) and Kadmon (2001). Unfortunately, it does not capture these
correctly and it makes further incorrect predictions for a wide range of facts. First,
one might wonder what happens if the focused constituent in (2) was the matrix
subject? In this case the first background entailment would be that someone knows
that it is raining. This entailment neither entails nor is entailed by the entailment that
Susan believes that it is raining, which therefore should be presupposed, contrary to
fact. Second, consider (3):
4
Technically, they deny the existence of presuppositions as separate category. What this means is that
they deny the existence of conventionally postulated presuppositions. If presuppositions are the type of
entities that can be predicted based on the overall meaning of a sentence, the difference between saying–
as they do–that certain entailments which show the typical projective behavior of presuppositions can be
distinguished as opposed to saying that precisely these entailments should be called presuppositions
becomes immaterial.
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496 M. Abrusán
(3) a. John killed [Bill]F

b. John killed someone
c. Bill is dead
The first background entailment of (3a) is (3b). This is independent from the
entailment (3c), which should therefore be presupposed, contrary to fact. These
problems are not unique to the particular examples mentioned above: a similar
problem will arise with any attitude verb whose subject is focused, and any tran-
sitive verb whose object is focused. Thus it seems that Wilson and Sperber’s (1979)
theory does not succeed in making correct predictions.
2.2 Simons (2001)
The idea that a conversational explanation can be given as to why certain items
stand with a presupposition was revived recently by Simons (2001). Thus rather
than a semantic mechanism, Simons (2001) attempts a purely pragmatic mechanism
of presupposition triggering, treading along the path envisaged by Stalnaker
(1974).5 Her idea in a nutshell is as follows. By uttering a sentence S a speaker
raises the question Q if S can be interpreted as addressing the question Q. Thus
uttering an atomic sentence with content p counts as raising the question Q ¼
Whether p?, and uttering a sentence with content :p counts as raising the question
Q ¼ Whether p? as well, and so does an utterance of a sentence with the content if p,
then . . ., and so on for other operators over which presuppositions project.6 Given
this, she defines the triggering mechanism as follows:
(4) If a speaker A raises the question Whether p? by uttering S, and p asymmetri-

cally entails7 some proposition q, then A indicates that she believes q to be true.
Let’s look at an example. A speaker who utters (5a) raises the question in (5b), and
indicates that she believes the proposition in (5d)—which is asymmetrically entailed
by (5c)—to be true:
(5) a. S ¼ John knows it is raining

b. Q ¼ Whether p? ¼ Whether John knows it is raining
c. p ¼ John knows it is raining
d. q ¼ It is raining
Since the sentence John does not know that it is raining would raise the same
question, namely (5b), it would be predicted to trigger the same presupposition, and
so on for other contexts.
5
The idea that at least some presuppositions should be conversationally triggered was also embraced by
Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (2000) and Kadmon (2001) and Schlenker (2010). Neither of these
discussions offer a way to derive these presuppositions.
6
The idea of presuppositions raising question alternatives was also used in Chemla (2009) to predict
presupposition projection.
7
A proposition p asymmetrically entails q if p entails q, but q does not entail p.
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As Simons (2001) herself points out, the proposal as it stands strongly over-
generates (cf. also discussion Abusch 2010). E.g. in connection with the example in
(5), the proposal predicts that it should also presuppose that John believes that it is
raining, and indeed any proposition that S asymmetrically entails. This is certainly
incorrect. It also predicts (6) to presuppose (6d), contrary to fact.
(6) John killed Bill

a. S ¼ John killed Bill
b. Q ¼ Whether p? ¼ Whether John killed Bill
c. p ¼ John killed Bill
d. q ¼ Bill is dead.
Further, from the fact that every asymmetrically entailed proposition is presup-
posed, it follows that every sentence is predicted to presuppose itself.8 This is
because any sentence S asymmetrically entails both S _ Q and S _ : Q, for any
proposition Q. Therefore, S is predicted to presuppose both of these disjunctive
propositions, and the intersection of the two is S itself.
Because of these grave problems, Simons suggests that the triggering principle
should be refined in such a way that only those entailments of S should end up being
presupposed that in some sense count as a precondition for the truth of S. While the
intuition is suggestive, the whole task of a triggering theory is to provide a definition
for what it means for a proposition to be a precondition in this sense. Unfortunately
Simons (2001) does not provide such a definition, and thus it is fair to say that the
puzzle has not been solved by this paper.
2.3 Abusch (2002, 2010)
Abusch’s paper offers a prediction for a subset of presupposition triggers, which she
identifies as soft triggers, including questions, focus and certain verbal triggers.
These have a representation involving alternatives. It is standardly assumed that
questions and focus introduce sets of alternative propositions which are derived by
replacing the focused/questioned element by a contextually salient object of a
suitable type. (Rooth 1992 wrt. focus, Hamblin 1973 and Karttunen 1977 wrt.
questions.)
(7) a. Who came?

b. [Bill]F came
c. The alternative set for both: ALT ¼ fthat Bill came, that Mary came; . . .g
Abusch proposes that sets of alternatives trigger the default presuppositional con-
straint according to which the proposition formed as the disjunction of the set is
true. This amounts to the claim that some alternative in the set is true, which is what
gives rise to the (defeasible) existential presupposition triggered by focus and
questions.
8
This was pointed out to me by Emmanuel Chemla (p.c.)
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498 M. Abrusán
Abusch then goes on to extend the same idea to certain verbal presuppositional
triggers. For these cases she stipulates that their lexical representation contains a set
of alternatives. As before, the presupposition arises from the constraint that the
disjunction of the alternatives is true. For example, the verbs know and stop trigger
the following alternatives:
(8) a. know triggers the alternatives ALT ¼ fknow, be unawareg

b. stop triggers the alternatives ALT ¼ fstop, continueg
If a sentence S that contains any of these triggers is uttered, the alternative prop-
ositions that we get by replacing the trigger by its lexical alternative are activated.
Given the default presuppositional constraint, we then pragmatically presuppose
that the disjunction of these alternative propositions is true:
(9) a. John knows that it is raining or John is unaware that it is raining

b. John stopped smoking or John continued to smoke
Since the disjunction still entails that it is raining (in the case of (9a)) or that John
used to smoke (in the case of (9b)), the correct presupposition is predicted.
Abusch’s account is convincing in the case of focus and questions, but somewhat
more dubious when it comes to verbal triggers (cf. also discussion in Schlenker
2010). The problem is that while for focus and questions the alternative sets were
derived simply by compositional semantics and pragmatics and were independently
motivated, in the case of verbal triggers it needs to be lexically stipulated for each
trigger what their alternative is. Since alternatives uniquely define what the pre-
supposition is, it is not less of a stipulation to postulate lexical alternatives for verbal
triggers than to simply postulate what their presupposition should be. There is no
reason for example why the lexical alternative of know could not be believe, and in
this case Abusch’s system would predict that ‘‘x knows that p’’ should presuppose
that ‘‘x believes that p’’. There is also no principle from which it would follow that
the verb kill should not trigger an alternative, and even less that this alternative
could not be find dead, in which case the death of the object argument should be
presupposed, incorrectly. Thus while Abusch makes correct predictions for the cases
she discusses, what is missing from her proposal is a principled reason for where
exactly the identity of the alternatives comes from, and thus her treatment of verbal
triggers remains stipulative.
2.4 Simons et al. (2010)
In a recent paper Simons et al. (2010) outline a triggering and projection theory for
what they term ‘‘projective meaning’’, which roughly covers phenomena more
commonly known as presuppositions and conventional implicatures. Projective
meanings in their terminology are implications that survive under the scope of an
entailment canceling operator. The core of their proposal is that implications project
if they do not address the Question Under Discussion:
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(10) Hypothesis about what projects and why:

a. All and only those implications of (embedded) sentences which are not
at-issue relative to the Question Under Discussion in the context have
the potential to project.
b. Operators (modals, negation, etc.) target at-issue content. (p. 315)
The first part of the hypothesis is based on the intuition that has been around
(cf. Stalnaker 1974; Abbott 2000; Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 2000) and is also
shared by the present paper, according to which presuppositions (and conventional
implicatures in the sense of Potts 2005) are typically not the main point of what is
said (or at-issue, in Simons et al.’s terminology). The second part states that
operators only target the main point of an utterance (cf. also Kratzer 1989 for related
ideas). The main point (or at-issue content) is defined as follows:
(11) Definition of at-issueness

a. A proposition p is at-issue iff the speaker intends to address the QUD
via ?p.
b. An intention to address the QUD via ?p is felicitous only if:
1. ?p is relevant to the QUD, and
2. the speaker can reasonably expect the addressee to recognize this
intention. (p. 323)
(12) Relevance to the QUD

a. An assertion is relevant to a QUD iff it contextually entails a partial
or complete answer to the QUD.
b. A question is relevant to a QUD iff it has an answer which ontextually
entails a partial or complete answer to the QUD. (p. 316)
Thus what becomes the main point of an utterance is determined by the content of
the discourse and speaker intentions, without reference to grammatical constraints.
Since what projects is what is not the main point, projection facts (and therefore
presuppositions) are predicted to be highly context sensitive and volatile. An
implication might behave like a presupposition (projective meaning) in one context,
but might be part of the main point (at-issue meaning) in another, and thus not
project. Let’s look at an example they discuss:
(13) Background scenario: a nutritionist has been visiting first grade classrooms
to talk to the children about healthy eating
Q: What most surprised you about the first graders?
A: They didn’t know that you can eat raw vegetables. (p. 317)
To determine what projects, in this case one has to look at the (contextual)
entailments of the statement in the scope of the matrix negation. One of these is that
you can eat raw vegetables. This proposition (and the yes–no question ?p that can be
formed from it) is arguably not one that is relevant to the question under discussion
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500 M. Abrusán
(at least if the generic statement is not also understood to be about the first graders),
hence it projects. Another entailment they consider is that the first graders know that
you can eat raw vegetables. This one can be intended as addressing the QUD, and is
thus identified as non-projective, at-issue content. It is therefore understood to be
under the scope of negation.
Some of the basic aspects of Simons et al.’s (2010) proposal are close in spirit to
the present paper, in particular that presuppositions are not at issue, hence not the
main point. They can also predict that presuppositions might disappear in some
contexts, namely when their content is understood as addressing the question under
discussion. As it was noted in the outset of this paper, such cases are indeed
pervasive. However, the theory as it stands predicts such shifts with much more ease
than is actually observed. The authors do notice this problem, but the proposed fix in
effect gives up on predicting what projects from the meaning of utterances, at least
when it comes to presuppositions of soft triggers.
Observe a variant of the previous example: According to Simons et al.’s (2010)
theory, no presupposition should be generated in this case:
(14) Q: What most surprised you about the first graders?

A: They didn’t know that they have failed the exam.
In (13), the proposition that first graders have failed the exam can easily be
understood (as being intended to be) addressing the QUD, at least in contexts where
the exam is very easy. Therefore, it is at-issue and should not project, but this is not
what we observe. So it seems presuppositions are not as easily cancelable by the
context as Simons et al. (2010) would have us believe. Similar cases are easy to find
with other triggers as well:
(15) Q: What do you know about John?

B: He still didn’t quit smoking.
In the above case, the implication of B’s utterance that John used to smoke is clearly
relevant information about John, and should therefore be addressing the QUD, and
not project. But this is not what we observe, instead, the implication seems to be
presupposed.
There are also cases where they predict entailments that are not presupposed to
be presupposed. In (16), the utterance of B entails that somebody knows that it is
raining. This entailment does not seem to be at-issue: speakers will not intend to
address the QUD in (16A) by it since it is not relevant to the QUD: it does not
contextually entail a partial or complete answer to the question by A, which is why a
dialogue in which A’s question is answered by Somebody knows that it is raining
would be quite odd. Therefore the existential entailment below is predicted to be
presupposed by Simons et al. (2010), contrary to fact.
(16) A: What surprised you about John?

B: He knows that it is raining.
entails: Somebody knows that it is raining.
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Simons et al. (2010) recognize that their theory over-predicts sensitivity to con-
textual factors, and faced with this problem say the following:
At-issueness, as we have defined it (. . .) is determined solely by conversational
structure. Whether or not a particular (propositional) implication of an utter-
ance is at-issue depends only on what the current QUD is. If the implication
(or its negation) is a potential answer to the QUD, the proposition is at-issue;
otherwise, it is not. But this runs counter to intuitions and observations
that linguistic form is, at the very least, a strong indicator of projective
status—hence the widely accepted view that presuppositions are conventional
parts of lexical content. (. . .) We posit that at least some constructions or
lexical items conventionally mark their content as not-at-issue. We remain
agnostic as to which expressions conventionally mark at-issue status. (p. 322)
However, since examples like the above are easily constructed with any soft
presupposition trigger, at the end of the day each of these will have to be con-
ventionally marked as triggering some not-at-issue, projective material. As a result,
the theory is not really telling us what projects, only that whatever projects is not at-
issue content.
3 Attention and aboutness
The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from
the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some
aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by
default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, con-
textual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that
we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay
attention to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed.
This two-tier view of how attention structures information is familiar from
studies of vision. (see e.g. Goldstein 2009; Itti and Koch 2001; Navalpakkam and
Itti 2005 among many others). A flickering light, a red dot on gray background, or
seeing our own name written on a screen attracts our attention immediately in any
context. These are examples that manifest the default, bottom-up processes of
attention. Interestingly, when looking at a scene, visual attention is also influenced
by what the scene is about: semantically more relevant cues attract attention. At the
same time, when looking at a photograph we might easily overlook somebody’s
shadow or reflection in the water, or the lack of these, even if these occupy a
comparatively large portion of the photograph. However, in a context in which
shadows or reflections are made salient and relevant, suddenly we pay attention to
such cues as well. These are examples of top-down, goal oriented mechanisms of
attention. Further, we also tend to assume that aspects of familiar scenes that we do
not pay attention to (for example shadows in a neutral context) are nevertheless
there.
The grammatical analogy with vision is the following. We instinctively pay
attention to information that is about the main event described by the sentence. This
123
502 M. Abrusán
corresponds to the default, bottom-up process of attention. Any information that is

also conveyed by the sentence but is not about the main event described is
presupposed, unless there is some contextual factor that directs attention to this
information as well. Such contextual factors correspond to top-down processes of
attention. In these cases what would normally be presupposed is not presupposed
any more: i.e. we have presupposition suspension. Note that what happens is not that
attention is completely diverted, rather, extra information is brought under the
spotlight of attention as well. This corresponds to the observation that there are no
cases reported in the literature (at least to my knowledge) where context would swap
the presupposed and the asserted aspects of the meaning of a soft trigger. Instead,
contextual effects tend to amount to the removal of presuppositions.9
3.1 The default main point
The question now is, what is the default point described by a sentence and among all
the myriad propositions that are entailed by a sentence, how do we find the ones that
are about the main point described by the sentence?
The intuition that we want to capture is that presuppositional assertions describe
complex states of events, some parts of which are independent from the main
events. So what we want to achieve is to tell independent events apart: Select the
main event described by the sentence, and decide what other information conveyed
by the sentence describe independent events from the main one. But this is a very
difficult task and cannot be easily accomplished just by looking at events themselves
because of the very complex mereological structure of events. For example, is the
event of raining part of the complex event of John’s knowing it? If not, why not?
To simplify matters, I will map events to their event times. The idea of looking at
event times instead of events themselves serves the purpose of making indepen-
dence more tractable: Events that happen at different times are clearly different
events. Further, in some cases, e.g. sentences involving mathematical truths (John
knows that 2 þ 2 ¼ 4), the possibility of invoking events is not obvious at all.
However, since event times are more abstract than events, evoking event times is
still possible even in these cases.
Thus I will assume that the default main point of a sentence is given by those
entailments that are by nature about the event time of the matrix predicate. Prop-
ositions that describe events that are not (or do not have to be—in the sense to
be introduced in Sect. 3.3) about the event time of the matrix predicate of S
are independent, and hence presupposed. Let’s illustrate the idea with a simple
example. Consider (17), in which t1 denotes the event time interval of the matrix
predicate, and t2 is some interval before t1 , given by the context. Let’s look at the
sentence S and two its (many) entailments, u and w:
9
A different case of context dependency is when presuppositions are added to otherwise non-presup-
positional expressions, as discussed in Schlenker (2010). These are also captured by the present mech-
anism, see Sect. 6.
123
(17) S ¼ John knows (at t1 ) that it was raining (at t2 ).

a. u ¼ John believes (at t1 ) that it was raining (at t2 ).
b. w ¼ It was raining (at t2 ).
In an intuitive sense, u is about the time denoted by t1 , but w is not: changing the
properties of the world at t1 will not affect the truth value of w, but it might affect
the truth value of u.
For concreteness, I will assume that event times denote salient intervals whose
value is assigned by the context. As such, they are rather like pronouns (cf. Partee
1973).10 In this system, predicates have an extra argument slot for time, thus what
are usually assumed to be one place predicates such as intransitive verbs are going to
be two place predicates, taking an individual and a time argument. Tense morphemes
introduce time variables that saturate the time argument slot of predicates in the
syntax. The denotation of this variable is given by the interpretation function i sup-
plied by the context, which assigns it an element from the domain of time intervals.
E.g. the sentence in (18) is true iff John is tired at the time assigned to t2 by i.11
(18) John is tired at t2
Now we might ask what it means for a sentence to be about the entity denoted by
one of its arguments, in our case about its time argument? Exactly this notion is
captured by Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro’s (2000) definition of aboutness,
introduced below.
3.2 Being about an entity
The intuitive idea of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (2000)12 is that the truth
value of a sentence that is not about an entity should not change if we change the
truth value of the facts about that entity. To capture this intuition, they give a
proposal that has two parts. The first is the definition of variants of an interpretation
with respect to an object. Given this notion, the property of a sentence being about
an object can be defined.
Definition 1 (The syntax of the language Lc ) Let Lc be a first order predicate

calculus language, where c is some constant symbol. The equality predicate is not
allowed in the language.
10
For convenience I further assume that the tense argument is represented in the syntax as well, though
this is not crucial. cf. Kusumoto (2005) for some recent arguments for this assumption, but also Keshet
(2008) for arguments against Kusumoto’s position.
11
I will be agnostic about the question whether it is the past/present/future feature (presupposition) on
tense variable/morpheme itself that contributes the meaning of anteriority or simultaneity (e.g. as in
Partee 1973), or whether these derive from phonologically null elements that stand in some relation with
tense morphemes, and give the ordering between event times (the time denoted by the tense morpheme,
here: t2 ) and evaluation times (e.g. cf. Kusumoto 2005).
12
Cf. also Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (2010) for a more recent exposition of the key ideas present
in Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (2000).
123
504 M. Abrusán
The primitive vocabulary of Lc consists of the following:

1. A set of constants designated in the metalanguage by letters a; b; c; . . .
2. A denumerably infinite set of variables v1 ; v2 ; v3 ; . . . The constants and variables
together constitute the terms.
3. A set of predicates, p, q, r, each with fixed arity
4. The logical connectives :; _; ^; !; $
5. The quantifier symbols 9; 8
6. The parentheses (,)
The set F of formulas of Lc is defined by the following rules:
1. If p is an n-ary predicate and t an n-tuple of terms, then p(t) 2 Lc
2. If F 2 Lc , and G 2 Lc , then :F 2 Lc , (F _ G) 2 Lc , (F ^ G) 2 Lc , (F ! G) 2 Lc ,
(F $ G) 2 Lc
3. If F 2 Lc , then (9vF) 2 Lc and (8vF) 2 Lc
4. All the sentences in Lc are defined by the rule 1–3.
Definition 2 (Interpretation) An interpretation M of Lc is a tuple M ¼ hD, ii such

that
1. D is a non-empty set of individuals and time intervals
2. i is a function that assigns
(a) to each predicate symbol of arity n a subset of Dn ,
(b) to each variable symbol an element of D (As a notational convention,
I will use t for variables over tense intervals, and x for variables over
individuals)
(c) to each constant symbol an element of D
The domain of M will be denoted by DM and the interpretation of M by iM .

NB: As indicated in the previous section, verbal predicates are assumed to have a
tense argument on top of any individual arguments. I will also make use of the
following simplifying assumptions: (a) definite descriptions denote individuals
(b) the denotation of indexicals is given by the interpretation function and their
indexical content is presupposed. E.g. you has the presupposition that it can only be
used felicitously if iM (you) denotes the addressee in the context. (c) For the pur-
poses of calculating aboutness I will also assume that the complement of attitude
predicates is absorbed into the attitude verb, so that know(x,t,p) is in fact a 2-place
predicate know-p(x,t). The reason why this is not harmful is because we are not
attempting to derive the entailments of verbs from their lexical semantics–we are
treating the origin of these entailments as a black box. Also, the mechanism
checking aboutness only ever needs to look at the matrix tense of the sentences it
examines, and not at embedded tenses. This allows turning these expressions into
simple extensional predicates and ignoring the intricate semantics of attitude verbs.
Note that none of the above assumptions (nor Lc in general) are meant as an
adequate theory of language: they are only simplifications that allow us to abstract
away from complex aspects of language that are not relevant for our purposes when
calculating aboutness.
123
Definition 3 (Satisfiability conditions) Let M be an interpretation of the language

Lc . The truth of a formula F in M is denoted by M F, and is inductively defined as
follows:
1. If F is an atomic sentence of the form p(k), where k is a tuple of constant or
variable symbols, M F iff iM (k) 2 iM (p).
2. M F and M F _ G are defined from M F and M G as usual.
3. M 9vF iff there exists an interpretation Mv=d that only differs from M by the
interpretation of the variable symbol v, st. iMv=d (v) is the element d of DMv=d and
Mv=d F.
Definition 4 (Variants of an interpretation with regard to an object) Roughly

speaking the notion of variants of an interpretation with regard to an object denoted
by constant symbol c is the set of interpretations M c that only differ from M by the
truth assignment of atomic sentences where c appears as an argument.
Let Lc be a first order predicate calculus language that contains the constant c and
does not contain the identity predicate.13 M0 is a c-variant of a model M iff it meets
the constraints listed below:
1. DM0 ¼ DM
2. iM0 ¼ iM , for every variable symbol and constant symbol
3. iM0 is defined from iM for each predicate symbol as follows: if p is a predicate
symbol of arity n
(a) if k is an n-tuple of terms of language Lc that contain no occurrence of the
constant symbol c, then iM0 ðkÞ 2 iM0 ðpÞ iff iM ðkÞ 2 iM ðpÞ.
(b) if an element hd1 ; . . . ; dn i of Dn is such that for every j in [1,n], dj 6¼ iM ðcÞ,
then hd1 ; . . . ; dn i 2 iM0 ðpÞ iff hd1 ; . . . ; dn i 2 iM ðpÞ.
M c will be used to denote the set of c-variant interpretations M 0 defined from M.
Suppose p is a unary predicate. Then the condition in 3(a) above says that the
properties of the entities that are denoted by constant symbols other than c do not
change in c-variants of M. 3(b) says that the properties of entities other than the one
denoted by c do not change. These two conditions amount to almost the same thing,
nevertheless they are both needed as the first (but not the second) rules out cases
where some other constant c0 denotes the same individual as c and therefore the
properties of c0 would also change in c-variants, the second (but not the first) rules
out that properties of individuals that do not have a name change in variants.
An example: Let Lc be a language with a unique unary predicate symbol p, and
the constant symbols a, b, c. Let M be an interpretation of Lc defined by:
D ¼ fd1 ; d2 ; d3 ; d4 g; iM ðaÞ ¼ d1 ; iM ðbÞ ¼ d2 ; iM ðcÞ ¼ d3 and iM ðpÞ ¼ fd1 ; d3 ;
d4 g. For every variant M 0 in M c , iM0 ðpÞ contains d1 , because iM ðpÞ contains d1 and d1
is the interpretation of the constant symbol a, which is different from constant
symbol c. Therefore the sentence p(a) is true in every variant M 0 . At the other
extreme, there are variants M 0 of M such that d3 is not in iM0 ðpÞ, because d3 is the
interpretation of c. In these variants p(c) is false, although it is true in M.
13
Though cf. Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (2000) for some suggestions on how the identity
predicate could be handled.
123
506 M. Abrusán
3.2.1 Aboutness
Let S be a sentence of language Lc . S is not about an object named by the constant

symbol c iff for every interpretation M, M S iff for every interpretation M 0 in M c
M 0 S:
(19) NAðS; cÞ holds iff 8MðM S iff 8M0 2 Mc M0 SÞ
A sentence S is about an object named by c if it is not the case that NAðS; cÞ:
(20) AðS; cÞ holds iff 9Mð9M0 2 Mc ðM S and M0 6 SÞÞ
3.2.2 Examples
Now consider the following examples:
(21) S ¼ Fido is tired
The sentence in (21) is about Fido, if there are two models M, M0 2 M Fido , such that
M S and M 0 6 S. Suppose that L is a language with a unique unary predicate
symbol is tired, and the constant symbols Fido, John, Mary. Let M be an inter-
pretation of L defined by:
1. D ¼ fd1 ; d2 ; d3 ; d4 g;
2. iM (Fido) ¼ d1 ; iM (Mary) ¼ d2 ; iM (John) ¼ d3
3. iM (is tired) ¼ fd1 ; d3 ; d4 g
From this model, a Fido-variant M0 can be defined, where iM0 (is tired) ¼ fd3 ; d4 g.
Thus M S and M0 6 S.
Consider now:
(22) S ¼ John is tired
The example in (22) is not about Fido, because for every M0 2 M Fido , M0 S, and
further for any model M, st. M S, for every M0 2 M Fido , M0 S.
(23) Fido is tired or Fido is not tired
The disjunction above is not about Fido, because it is a tautology hence it is true in
every model M. Interestingly,
(24) Some individual is tired
is about Fido, because there are two models M, M0 2 M Fido , such that M S and
M0 6 S: suppose originally in our example we had iM (is tired) ¼ fd1 g, and i0M (is
tired) = ;.
123
Let’s look at a sentence that has a tense argument as well.
(25) John is tired at t2
The sentence in (25) is about t2 , if there are two models M, M0 2 Mt2 , such that M
S and M0 6 S. Let’s add tense to our L above: Suppose that L0 is a language with a
unique binary predicate symbol is tired, and the constant symbols Fido, John, Mary
and the variables t1 ; t2 . Let M be an interpretation of L0 defined by:
1. D ¼ fd1 ; d2 ; d3 ; d4 ; d5 ; d6 g;
2. iM (Fido) ¼ d1 ; iM (Mary) ¼ d2 ; iM (John) ¼ d3 ; iM ðt1 Þ ¼ d5 ; iM ðt2 Þ ¼ d6
3. iM (is tired) ¼ fhd1 ; d6 i; hd3 ; d6 i; hd4 ; d5 ig
From this model, a t2 -variant M0 can be defined, where hd3 ; d6 i 62 i0M (is tired). Thus
M S and M0 6 S and so the sentence is about t2. Note that (25) is also about John,
but it is not about Fido or t1 : removing hd1 ; d6 i or hd4 ; d5 i from iM0 (is tired) will not
affect the truth of (25) in the model. In c-variant models it is not only the properties
of c itself that are allowed to differ, but the truth of sentences that contain c as an
argument.
3.3 Triggering mechanism—default version
The definition above defines what it means for a sentence S to be about an object. In
principle however we are interested in whether propositions (entailments of S) are
about an object. The relationship between the two is somewhat indirect: we need to
check whether sentences that can be used to express a proposition are about an
object. If yes, I will assume that the proposition expressed by the sentence is about
that object as well.14
We are now in the position to give the first version of the default triggering
mechanism for soft presuppositions:
(26) Presupposition triggering (1st version, to be revised)

Entailments of a sentence S that can be expressed by sentences that are not
about the event time of the matrix predicate of S are presupposed.
Being about is to be understood as defined in the preceding subsection. This predicts

(17): the (sentence expressing the) entailment that John believes at t1 that it is
raining at t2 is about the matrix event time t1 , hence not presupposed, while (the
sentence expressing) the entailment that it is raining at t2 is not about the matrix
event time t1 , hence it is presupposed. (The reasoning that predicts this as well as
further examples will be spelled out in more detail in Sect. 4.)
Yet with this simple approach the obvious question arises: what about sentences
such as (27), where the embedded proposition and the matrix proposition are as-
sumed to be true at the same time? The proposal in (26) predicts that the embedded
14
One limitation of this approach, pointed out to me by C. Potts, is that only propositions that can be
expressed in a sentence can be presupposed. For the moment the present paper has to accept this.
123
508 M. Abrusán
proposition in (27) is not independent from the main assertion, and therefore, not
presupposed, contrary to fact:
(27) John knows (at t1 ) that it is raining (at t1 ).

a. u ¼ John believes (at t1 ) that it is raining (at t1 ).
b. w ¼ It is raining (at t1 ).
What we need is a way to distinguish accidental co-temporaneity from non-acci-

dental one. In the above example, though it so happens that the embedded propo-
sition and the matrix proposition are true at the same time, this is only an accident, it
could be otherwise. But the co-temporaneity of the matrix time of u with the matrix
time of S is not an accident, but follows from the lexical interpretation of know. So
we need a method of distinguishing accidental and non-accidental co-temporal
dependencies.
To remedy this, I will assume that the default presupposition triggering mech-
anism looks beyond the actual sentence and assesses the properties of alternative
sentences that I call temporal-alternatives (or just T-alternatives for short).
T-alternatives are obtained by replacing the temporal arguments of the matrix and
embedded predicates with different ones.15 More precisely, we replace the temporal
variables with ones which the assignment function maps to different intervals than
the original time of the matrix predicate. E.g.:
(28) John knows (at time t1 ) that it was raining (at time t1 )
T-alternative: John knows (at time t1 ) that it was raining (at time t2 )
(29) John managed (at time t1 ) to solve the exercise (at t1 )

T-alternative: *John managed (at time t1 ) to solve the exercise (at t2 )
Let’s say that p and p0 are corresponding entailments if they can be expressed by
sentences that only differ in their temporal arguments. Take an entailment p of S. If
there is a well formed T-alternative S0 to S such that the corresponding entailment to
p (namely p0 of S0 ) can be expressed by a sentence that is not about the event time of
the matrix clause of S0 , then I will say that p is only accidentally about the matrix
event time of S. Let’s look at the examples above. In (28), the entailment that it was
raining (at time t1 ) of the original sentence is only accidentally about t1 , because
there is a T-alternative (John knows (at time t1 ) that it was raining (at time t2 ))
whose corresponding entailment (that it was raining at t2 ) is not about the matrix
tense of the T-alternative. On the other hand, (29) does not have a well formed
T-alternative where the two temporal arguments differ (cf. Karttunen 1971a and
Sect. 4.1.2 on temporal restrictions of implicatives): for this reason the entailment of
the original sentence in (29) that John solved the exercise at t1 is non-accidentally
(i.e. necessarily) about the matrix event time.
15
Moreover, quantified temporal arguments might be replaced with non-quantified ones in T-alterna-
tives. For example John knows that some times are better than others (example due to Tim Williamson
(pc)) might have as a T-alternative John knows that t4 is better than t6 .
123
We are now in the position to formulate a revised version of the default triggering
mechanism for soft triggers:
(30) Presupposition triggering (2nd version, to be revised)
Entailments of a sentence S that can be expressed by sentences that are not
necessarily about the event time of the matrix predicate of S (i.e. they are
either not about it, or only accidentally so) are presupposed.
This now makes correct predictions about (27b) as well: this entailment is predicted
to be presupposed because although it is about t1 , it is only accidentally so.
3.4 Triggering mechanism—context sensitive version
Besides the default, grammatically defined main point, it is possible that the context
or the intentions of the participants of the conversation raise interest in aspects of
the entailed meaning of the sentence that would otherwise ‘‘pass under the radar’’,
and be presupposed. In Sect. 5 I will suggest two ways in which this might happen:
by evidential verbs and by focus. This is not intended as an exhaustive list, indeed it
is likely other factors will turn out to be relevant as well in the future.
One factor that can bring extra elements under the spotlight of attention is focus.
As Beaver (2004) observes, (31) does not suggest that the student has plagiarized his
work:
(31) If the TA discovers that [your work is plagiarized]F , I will be [forced to
notify the Dean] (Beaver 2004, slightly modified)
Focus is usually taken to be the part of a sentence that conveys the new or highlighted
information, thus the information that directly answers a background question. In this
sense, focus grammatically signals the presence of a background question. I will
propose that grammatically marked background questions can introduce a secondary
(or pragmatic) main point. Secondary main points concern the event time of the
sentence expressing the most direct proposition that answers the background ques-
tion. The presupposition triggering mechanism looks both at the default (grammati-
cal) and the secondary (pragmatic) main points and requires the presupposition to be
independent from both of these. This derives the above data in the present framework.
(32) Presupposition triggering (3rd, final version)

Entailments of a sentence S that can be expressed by sentences that are
neither necessarily about the event time of the matrix predicate of S nor
about the event time of the sentence expressing the most direct answer to
the (grammatically signaled) background question are presupposed.
Put more simply, the proposal above requires that presuppositions be independent
from both the default and the secondary (pragmatic) main points. Secondary main
points can be introduced by grammatical markers such as focus and evidential verbs
(and presumably others). In (31), focusing the embedded clause indicates that the
background question is What will I discover? The direct answer to this question is a
123
510 M. Abrusán
proposition, namely the proposition denoted by the embedded clause your work is
plagiarized. The pragmatic, secondary main point therefore concerns the informa-
tion that is about the tense argument of the sentence expressing this proposition, i.e.
the tense argument of the embedded clause. For this reason, the information con-
veyed by the embedded clause is not independent from the secondary main point,
and is not predicted to be presupposed. In most cases however there is either no
grammatically signaled secondary main point, or this is the same as the default main
point, and thus no contextual suspension of presupposition is observed.
4 The bottom-up process: some core examples
This section describes the default, bottom-up process, the output of which might be
modified be taking into consideration the effects of contextual, top-down processes.
Such contextual factors will be discussed in more detail in Sect. 5.
4.1 Factive presuppositions
I now address in more detail how the presuppositions of factive verbs can be
derived. The example I look at in detail is the verb know, but it will be shown that
the same analysis carries over to the whole class of factive verbs. Some other
members of this class in English include realize, discover, notice, recognize, find
out, remember, forget, be aware that, admit, intuit and a subclass of sensory factives
sense, see, smell, hear, detect, observe. A major subclass of factive verbs is the class
of emotives, factive verbs used primarily to convey the subject’s emotional attitude
towards information. This class, examined in Sect. 4.1.3, includes predicates such
as regret, be annoyed, be upset, be glad, be happy, be ecstatic. In Sect. 4.1.4
I introduce cross-linguistic data from Catalan, Greek and Hungarian that have been
taken to show that factivity is also connected to certain grammatical features and
show how the proposal in this paper can predict them.
4.1.1 Know
Let’s come back to (17), repeated below:
(33) John knows (at time t1 ) that it is raining (at time t2 )
The presupposition triggering mechanism looks at the set of lexical (or ‘‘com-
monsense’’) entailments.16 These entailments are not entailments of predicates, but
16
Is not necessary to look at logical entailments of S, i.e. entailments that can be derived independently
of the content of S, e.g. S _ Q. On the one hand they are likely not salient candidates for presuppositions,
precisely because they arise independently from the content of S. But even if they were candidates for
presuppositions, the present theory would make correct predictions about them, this is because if S is
atomic and about some time t, then its non-tautological logical entailments are also about t. Here is why.
Take a model M that M 6 S and M 6 Q. Since S is about t, there is an M0 which is a t-variant of M st. and
M0 S. Since S logically entails Q, M0 Q. Thus no non-tautological logical entailment is predicted to
be presupposed. Tautological entailments of S are predicted to be presupposed, as these are never about
the matrix time, but this is harmless.
123
entailments of sentences. Lexical entailments are not given in a formal way: they
are only available to speakers by inspecting their intuitions about the lexical
meaning of predicates and the meaning of S itself. Below is a list of some of the
intuitively plausible lexical entailments of (33):
(34) Some lexical entailments of John knows at t1 that it is raining at t2 17

a. John knows at t1 that it is raining t2
b. John believes at t1 that it is raining at t2
c. It is raining at t2
d. It is humid at t2
e. John’s belief is justified at t1
f. 9t, st. John knows at t that it is raining at t2
NB: It is not claimed here that a sentence such as (33) can be ‘factorized’ into its
constituent lexical entailments, nor is it assumed that there is a solution to the
equation John knows that p ¼ John believes that p ^ p ^ X. (cf. e.g. Williamson
2002; Yablo 2008 etc. on the dangers of such an assumption.) The only claim made
is that speakers have intuitive access to plausible lexical entailments. The above list
merely provides examples of such entailments and is not meant to be an exhaustive
definition of the meaning of S.
Which of the above entailments, if any, are predicted to be presupposed?
According to the definition of presupposition triggering above, those entailments of
(33) will be predicted to be presupposed (by the default mechanism) that are
expressed by sentences that are not necessarily about the event time of the matrix
predicate of (33). Assuming that t1 and t2 pick out non-overlapping tense intervals,
(34c) is not about t1 : changing the properties of the world at t1 will not influence the
truth of (34c). More precisely, there are no models M, M0 2 M t1 such that M
(34c) and M0 6 (34c). The same is true for (34d), which also expresses an entail-
ment of (34c). Therefore, (34c,d) are predicted to be presupposed by the default
triggering mechanism.
However, changing the properties of the world at t1 will influence the truth of
(34a,b,e). Take (34b). It is easy to see that there will be two models M, M0 2 Mt1
such that M (34b) and M0 6 (34b): simply take a model M st. M (34b), form a
t1 variant M0 in which John does not have the belief in question: it follows that M0 6
(34b). The same reasoning applies to (34a,e) as well. But we are not done yet, it also
needs to be checked that the latter three entailments are not accidentally about the
matrix time of the sentence. For this we need to check whether we can find a T-
alternative S0 of (33) the corresponding entailments of which are not about the
matrix event time of S0 . However, this is not the case, as the time of the three
entailments in question is crucially the same as the matrix tense of the sentence: e.g.
we cannot derive valid belief-entailments of knowledge that are true at a different
17
Strictly speaking, as mentioned in Sect. 3.2., the syntactic representation of the sentence that the
aboutness definition works with is one where the complement is absorbed into the predicate: John knows-
it-is-raining-at-t2 at t1 .
123
512 M. Abrusán
time than the knowledge. Therefore the T-alternatives of (33) will preserve the
property that their entailments corresponding to (34a,b,e) will be about the matrix
time of the T-alternative. For this reason, the entailments expressed by (34a,b,e) are
not predicted to be presupposed by the default triggering mechanism.
The existential entailment in (34f) that we get by replacing the matrix tense
argument in the original sentence by an existentially bound tense variable is also
about the matrix tense: this is because, as discussed in the previous section,
according to Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro’s (2000) definition of aboutness
existential statements are about every individual in the domain: hence (34f) is about
every tense interval in the domain. Thus the existential entailment is also not
predicted to be presupposed by the present mechanism.18
As was already mentioned in the previous section, we also need to look at
examples such as (35), where the embedded and the matrix tense happen to be the
same.
(35) Lexical entailments of: John knows at t1 that it is raining at t1

a. John knows at t1 that it is raining t1
b. John believes at t1 that it is raining at t1
c. It is raining at t1
d. It is humid at t1
e. John’s belief is justified at t1
f. 9t, st. John knows at t that it is raining at t
As for (35a,b,e,f) the reasoning presented above will go through as before. What is
interesting is the case of (35d,c). The default presupposition triggering mechanism
states that those entailments of (34) will be predicted to be presupposed that are
expressed by sentences that are not about, or only accidentally about the event time
of the matrix predicate of (34). An entailment p is only accidentally about the matrix
tense of S if there is a well-formed alternative S0 to S such that the corresponding
entailment p0 of S0 can be expressed by a sentence that is not about the event time of
the matrix clause of S0 . This is indeed the case with (35): the sentence in (34) is its
T-alternative, and the corresponding entailments to (35c,d), namely (34c,d) are
indeed not about the matrix event time of (34), as it was shown above. Therefore,
(34c,d) are only accidentally about the matrix event time, and thus the propositions
they express are predicted to be presupposed.
As mentioned in the outset, the presuppositions of other factive verbs such as
forget, beware that, realize, etc. can be predicted in the same way as described
above for know. Notice also that the present approach derives presuppositions from
entailments. Contrasting the verb know with the verb believe, the latter is not factive
simply because it does not entail the truth of its embedded complement. Of course
one might ask why this difference in entailments exists. But this is a question
18
Note that T-alternatives only operate on the original sentence: Although they can replace quantified
tense variables with non-quantified ones in the alternative, the resulting entailments then are computed as
normal from the T-alternative. Thus the corresponding entailments to (34f) will also be existential
statements.
123
concerning concept formation, and is beyond the scope of what a triggering theory
might hope to achieve.
4.1.2 Implicative verbs
It is useful to contrast factive verbs with another class of veridical predicates,

implicative verbs. As Karttunen (1971a) has showed, implicative predicates such as
manage, remember, see fit are veridical, but they do not presuppose their comple-
ment.19
(36) a. John managed to solve the problem.

b. John saw fit to apologize.
c. John remembered to lock the door.
Interestingly, as Karttunen notes, the tense of the embedded predicate is not inde-
pendent of the matrix tense, in the sense that it cannot be modified by independent
temporal adverbials. Cf. the following examples:
(37) a. #John managed to solve the problem next week.

b. #John saw fit to arrive the day after tomorrow.
c. #John remembered to lock his door tomorrow.
The above facts contrast with other veridical predicates that combine with infinitival
clauses, where such modification is available:
(38) John was happy to arrive tomorrow.
Intuitively it is clear why we observe this restriction: managing to do something and

doing it are really the same event, and therefore the two cannot be modified by
independent temporal (or spacial) adverbials. This means that in the case of
implicative verbs the temporal argument of the embedded clause is keyed to the
tense of the matrix verb. For this reason, the sentences above do not have a well-
formed T-alternative in which the matrix and the embedded tense are evaluated at
different time intervals. Given this lexical property of implicatives, the embedded
complement of implicative verbs is always about the matrix tense and is therefore
not predicted to be presupposed by the present system.20
4.1.3 Emotive factive verbs
The exact nature of emotive factive verbs such as regret has been a matter of some
controversy, with some researchers suggesting that they might not belong to the
19
Thanks to Jacopo Romoli and Kyle Rawlins (pc.) for bringing this issue to my attention.
20
A similar analysis might be available for examples such as force, arrange, in which cases the time of
the embedded clause is also not independent from the matrix one: in particular, the event time of the
embedded clause cannot precede (and in some cases, even coincide with) the event time of the matrix
predicate.
123
514 M. Abrusán
class of true factive verbs. This section argues that they are factive after all and fall
under the scope of the present theory.
Traditionally, emotive factives verbs were assumed to be just like cognitive
factives in presupposing the truth of their complement (cf. Kiparsky and Kiparsky
1970; Karttunen 1971b). Examples such as (39) provide good reason for this: The
statement that these predicates are factive is in accordance with the intuition that
from (39a) one tends to infer that it is raining and that (39b) seems to be contra-
dictory.
(39) a. I doubt that John regrets that it is raining

b. #It is not raining but John regrets that it is raining.
However, it has been suggested that emotive factives only presuppose that the
subject believes the truth of the embedded proposition (cf. e.g. Klein 1975;
Schlenker 2003; Egré 2008). Examples such as (40), first put forward by Klein
(1975), are often cited to back up this claim.
(40) a. Falsely believing that he had inflicted a fatal wound, Oedipus regretted
killing the stranger on the road to Thebes (Klein 1975; quoted in
Gazdar 1979, p. 122)
b. John wrongly believes that Mary got married, and he regrets/is enraged
that she is no longer single (Egré 2008, based on Schlenker 2003)
In these examples even though the first conjunct entails the falsity of the comple-
ment of regret, the sentences are acceptable, which was taken to argue by some of
the above authors that emotive factives are not really factive.
It seems to me that this conclusion is premature, and a factive analysis can be
defended. Following Gazdar (1979), it might be assumed that Klein’s (1975)
example above involves free indirect speech. Thus it reports an attitude of a subject
towards facts as perceived by him. This means that the implications of (40a) do not
have to be shared by the speaker, which accounts for the lack of veridicality in this
example. Thus, according to Gazdar, (40a) is acceptable because it reports a situ-
ation in which Oedipus is saying to himself ‘‘I killed that stranger’’. He points out
that similar examples are possible with aware:
(41) Falsely believing that he had inflicted a fatal wound, Oedipus became
aware that he was a murderer.
Under the right conditions it is not hard to construct cases analogous to (40b) and
(41) with know as well:
(42) a. John suffers from paranoia. He falsely believes that the police is spying
on him and what is more he knows they are listening to his phone calls.
b. The keys were not in the drawer but she knew that they were there,
so she foolishly kept on searching.
123
c. It’s not what he doesn’t know that bothers me, it’s what he does know
for sure but just isn’t true. [Will Rogers about Ronald Reagan, from
Yablo 2008]
All these cases become acceptable once they are understood as reporting a firm
belief or feeling of ‘‘knowledge’’ on somebody’s part. In this sense they are anal-
ogous to the free indirect discourse cases discussed above. This argues in favor of
the possibility that regret and emotive factive verbs are not in principle different
from true factive verbs. This conclusion is also supported by the observation that
despite there being examples such as (40b), examples such as (39) are not
acceptable either, which argues that regret (also) has a factive presupposition.
It might also be a possibility however that (at least in the case of some) emotive
factives the inference about the subject’s belief state is also independently pre-
supposed. One fact that goes in this direction, pointed out to me by Jacopo Romoli
(p.c.), is that (43a) is acceptable as opposed to (43b):
(43) a. I will later regret that I did not tell the truth.
b. #I will later know that I did not tell the truth.
The example in (43a) indicates that emotive factives such as regret imply that the
onset of the belief state is earlier than the regretting itself. The entailment that is true
before the matrix event time is predicted to be presupposed by the present account,
because it is not about the matrix event time. From this presupposition, the hearers
might pragmatically derive that the subject has the same belief at the event time as
well, which gives rise to the implication that the subject believes the truth of the
complement as well.21
4.1.4 Factivity cross-linguistically
It has been observed in a number of languages in connection with factive verbs that
the linguistic form of the complement makes a difference with respect to factivity22
(Cf. Quer 2001; Giannakidou 1999, 2009). For example in Catalan, some factive
verbs can take complements both in the indicative and in the subjunctive. Factive
presuppositions only arise in the latter case (cf. Quer 2001). Similarly, in Greek,
some verbs such as emotive factives allow embedded complements with both the
complementizer oti and the complementizer pu. The truth of the complement is only
presupposed in the latter case (cf. Varlokosta 1994; Roussou 2010; Ginzburg and
21
An anonymous reviewer asks why verbs such as surprise do not presuppose that the subject expected
(at some prior time) the negation of the embedded proposition to hold. However, it seems that what is
entailed in this case is at most that the subject did not expect p. This is shown by examples such as ‘‘Bill
was surprised to be mugged on the beach’’ which can be true if Bill simply had no expectations con-
cerning mugging. What events (if any) are described by negative statements such as the one above is a
difficult issue, see Kratzer (1989) for discussion. I believe though that rather than entailing the lack of
expectations at a time prior to the event time of surprise, what surprise really entails is that the subject
believes (at the time of being surprised) that p is/was an unlikely thing to happen. This entailment is not
predicted to be presupposed by my account.
22
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing these facts to my attention.
123
516 M. Abrusán
Kolliakou 1997; Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2009). In Hungarian, the matrix sentence
with the main verb tud ‘know’ might contain an anaphoric pronoun that introduces
the embedded clause. Depending on the nature of this pronoun, the truth of the
complement is either presupposed or not.
Let’s take a look at the data:
(44) Catalan (Quer 2001, p. 107)

a. Es queixava que li posessin
REFL complain.IMPF.3SG that her/him put.SUB.IMPF.3PL
males notes
bad marks
‘S/he complained that they gave her/him bad marks.’
b. Es queixava que li posaven
REFL complain.IMPF.3SG that her/him put.IND.PST.3PL
males notes
bad marks
‘S/he complained that they gave her/him bad marks.’
Quer (2001) notes that (44b), in which the complement clause is in the indicative,
can be felicitously continued with ‘‘but s/he wasn’t right: they always gave her/him
reasonable marks’’. This is impossible in the case of (44a), where the complement is
in the subjunctive. This shows that (44a) entails the truth of the complement clause,
but (44b) does not. When the complement is entailed, as in (44a), it is also predicted
to be presupposed in the same way as the examples in the previous sections. When
the complement is not entailed, the factive presupposition does not arise.
Similar data have been discussed in Greek, except in this case the grammatical
difference is in the complementizer selected. Many verbal triggers in Greek can
select for either the complementizer oti or the complementizer pu, cf. Varlokosta
(1994), Roussou (2010), Ginzburg and Kolliakou (1997), Giannakidou (1998, 1999,
2009). Only sentences where the complement is introduced by pu are factive:
(45) Greek
a. O Janis paraponethike oti ton ksexasa.
The John complained.3sg that.IND him forgot.1sg
‘John complained that I forgot him.’
b. O Janis paraponethike pu ton ksexasa.
The John complained.3sg that.IND him forgot.1sg
‘John complained that I forgot him.’
The above two sentences differ both in what they entail and what they presuppose.
(45a), that contains the complementizer oti, could be followed by ‘‘But he is wrong,
I did not forget him’’. This is not possible in the case of the pu-complement in (45b).23
23
Thanks to Sabine Iatridou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, George Tsoulas and Eirini Kotsovili for con-
tributing their native judgments. George Tsoulas notes that this pattern is clearly the general tendency, but
that some variation in the judgments might exist.
123
This shows that the truth of the oti-complement is not entailed, but the truth of the pu-
complement is entailed.
In Hungarian too factivity might depend on something other than the predicate, at
least in the case of know and perception verbs such as see. In this language, verbs
that select for a clausal complement might govern an anaphoric pronoun that refers
to the clausal complement. Normally this pronoun is the demonstrative azt ‘it/that’,
and it can remain unpronounced. In some cases, another anaphoric pronoun úgy ‘so’
is possible as well. Complements introduced with this anaphor are never entailed,
not even in the case of factive verbs.24 As in the previous cases, only (46a) is
factive.
(46) Hungarian
a. Péter (azt) tudja, hogy János elment a buliba
Peter it knows that Janos went the party.Iness
‘Peter knows that John went to the party.’
b. Péter úgy tudja, hogy János elment a buliba
Peter so knows that Janos went the party.Iness
‘Peter believes (based on some reasonable evidence) that John went
to the party.’
One interesting question that the above facts pose is why the linguistic form
makes a difference with respect to what the sentences entail. Since the present
account does not attempt to predict why lexical entailments arise, this paper has
nothing to say about this question. Another question is, given that we observe the
above entailment patterns, can the present account correctly predict which examples
will be presuppositional. This easier question we can answer affirmatively.25 In all
of the cases mentioned above, when the truth of the complement is not presupposed,
it is not entailed either. When it is entailed, it is presupposed as well. The approach
in this paper for these data is straightforward: the grammatical differences men-
tioned above determine, for the given language, whether the complement is entailed
or not. When it is entailed, the triggering mechanism kicks in, and flags the
entailment as presupposed as well.
4.2 Change of state verbs and achievements
The section first looks at regular change of state verbs such as stop, after which
I turn to examining achievement verbs such as win and cognitive change of state
verbs such as discover. As in the previous discussion, the reasoning presented in
24
It is not the case though that complements introduced with azt ‘it/that’ are always entailed, e.g. hisz
‘believe’, gondol ‘think’ can also stand with azt ‘it/that’, without entailing the truth of their complements.
25
But note that lexical accounts might have a way for accounting for these facts as well. Suppose that
there is no difference in the presuppositionality of the verb per se, in all the cases the truth of the
complement is presupposed. This complement however could be interpreted (because of a grammatical
property introduced by mood or the complementizer) as non-actual. In this case what would be pre-
supposed is essentially just a modal statement, which could be easily satisfied in most contexts and would
not give rise to factivity as normally understood.
123
518 M. Abrusán
connection with these predicates will carry over to the whole class of change of state
predicates, as well as achievement verbs with a preparatory stage such as win.26
As it was argued above, to predict which entailments of the sentence will be
presupposed, we only need to consider the set of lexical entailments. Consider now
(47), in which t1 denotes the event time of the predicate, in this case the time of the
stopping. Let’s assume that the lexical entailments of (47) are as follows:
(47) John stopped smoking at t1

a. John does not smoke at t1
b. John smoked at t2 (where t2 is some contextually given interval
before t1 )
c. John stopped smoking at t1
The event time of S is denoted by t1 . Its denotation is given by the interpretation

function i, which assigns it an element from the domain of time intervals. In this
example, the event time denotes the interval that starts just before the onset of non-
smoking, and goes on for a certain, potentially very short time. In some other cases,
it might be reasonable to assume that the event time also includes a longer segment
of the stage where the previous activity is still going on. This second option might
be more intuitive with gradual transitions, e.g. stop the car.27 However, even in this
second case the sentence also entails that the previous state held before the event
time. Notice that this contrasts with the inference that the final state continues to
hold, which is not an entailment. This is shown by the difference in the acceptability
of the examples in (48) below.
(48) a. #John stopped smoking, but he has never smoked before.

b. John stopped smoking, but then he started again.
In the case of change of state verbs some entailments are lexically specified to be
true at some time other than the event time. This is what happens in (47b), where the
lexical entailment that John used to smoke at some time preceding the event time
comes from the lexical semantics of the change of state verb. Since this is entail-
ment is true at some interval the precedes the event time t1 it is not about t1 :
changing the properties of the world at t1 will not influence the truth of (47b). More
precisely, there are no models M, M0 2 Mt1 and M (47b) and M0 6 (47b).
Therefore, the proposition expressed by (47c) is predicted to be presupposed by the
default triggering mechanism. On the other hand, (47a) and (47c) are not predicted
to be presupposed as these are clearly about the event time t1 : changing the prop-
erties of the world at t1 will influence the truth of (47a,c). Take (47a). It is easy to
see that there will be two models M, M0 2 Mt1 such that M (47a) and M0 6 (47a):
simply take a model M (47a), form a t1 variant M0 in which John does not smoke
at t1 : then M0 6 (47a). The same reasoning applies to (47c), which is just the
26
The latter were argued to be presuppositional by Simons (2001) and Abusch (2010).
27
Further, it might not be possible to pin down the exact moment when the ‘change’ starts: as it is shown
very nicely in Landman (1991, Chap. 4), such attempts inevitably run into the vagueness problem.
123
sentence itself. Therefore the propositions expressed by (47a,c) are not predicted to
be presupposed.
It might be the case that an entailment of a sentence can be expressed by two
sentences that differ in their arguments. For example, the sentences in (49) might be
expressing contextually equivalent entailments of (47).
(49) a. John smoked at some time t2 before t1 .

b. John smoked at some time t2 . (where t2 is interpreted as an interval not
overlapping with t1 )
Interestingly, (49a) is technically about the matrix tense t1 of (47), but not (49b).
Thus, the triggering mechanism will predict that the entailment expressed by (49b)
is presupposed, but it will not predict that the entailment expressed by (49a) is
presupposed, even though these entailments might be contextually equivalent. But
this is not contradictory, because the triggering mechanism only makes positive
predictions, not negative ones. It predicts for a proposition p that it is presupposed,
if that is the case, and says nothing about propositions that are not predicted to be
presupposed. In particular, it does not make any claim that a proposition that is not
predicted to be presupposed cannot be presupposed in some other way: this might
happen if some other mechanism kicks in, or as in the above case, if a contextually
equivalent proposition can be expressed by a sentence that is not about the matrix
time, and is therefore predicted to be presupposed. Notice also that the triggering
mechanism says that entailments are presupposed if there is a sentence expressing
them that is not necessarily about the matrix (or secondary) event time.
The theory also makes the prediction that if two aspectual verbs were to differ
only in the lengths of the interval denoted by the event time, their corresponding
presuppositions should also differ. This prediction seems to be borne out as well.
The following are examples from Hungarian:
(50) a. János eljött

‘John came’
b. János megjött
‘John came/arrived’
In the above examples the overall meaning is approximately the same, but there is a
difference (resembling the difference btw. come and arrive in English, respectively)
in that the event time seems to denote a different interval.
(51) a. Tegnap János eljött

‘Yesterday John came’
b. Tegnap János megjött
‘Yesterday John came/arrived’
In the case of eljött, modification with yesterday suggests that the whole event of
John leaving the point of departure and arriving at target location happened yes-
terday and is not compatible with a scenario in which he departed weeks ago.
123
520 M. Abrusán
In contrast, if yesterday modifies a sentence with megjött it suggests that the ending
phase of John’s trajectory happened yesterday, but is compatible with him departing
weeks ago. Correspondingly, the presuppositions of the two examples are different
too, as predicted: The negation of (51a) suggests that John stayed at home, while the
negation of (51b) suggests that he left home.
4.2.1 Achievement verbs and presuppositions about earlier stages
The present proposal also predicts that inferences about preparatory stages of
achievement verbs such as win will also end up being presupposed. (cf. Simons
2001; Abusch 2010). For example the sentences in (52) seem to presuppose that
John participated in the race.
(52) a. John did not win the Road Race.

b. If John did won the Road Race, he’s got more victories than anyone
else in history. (from Abusch 2010)
This presupposition can be predicted in a similar way the presuppositions of change

of state verbs above: the truth of the preparatory stage is entailed, and since it is
about a time interval that precedes the point of winning, it is not about the event
time of winning.
(53) John won the race at t1 .

a. John participated in the race at t2 (where t2 is an interval preceding t1 ).
Note that t2 has to be chosen in such a way that it excludes t1 , that is t2 is over just
before t1 . More precisely, what happens is that there are an infinite number of
intervals at which participating is true, and all the sentences that are about intervals
that are subintervals of participating that exclude the endpoint are predicted to be
presupposed. So suppose John participated in the race from 3 pm to 6 pm, and he
won it exactly at 6 pm. Now all subintervals t of [3, 6[ (that is the interval that
excludes the endpoint 6 pm) are such that it is true at t that John participated in the
race at t. As for all such t, the sentence that John participated at t is not about t1 ¼ 6
pm, every proposition expressing that John participated at some subinterval of [3, 6[
will be predicted to be presupposed. But the conjunction of all these propositions is
equivalent to the proposition that John participated during [3, 6[, which is therefore
the felt presupposition. (Note that the same reasoning also applies to the phase
preceding the change in change of state verbs discussed in the previous section: here
too the actual presupposition that arises is the one that is true at the maximal interval
at which the preparatory stage holds.) The implication that John also participated at
the point of winning the race, in the above example at 6 pm, arises as an implicature
from the presupposition that he participated during [3, 6[. Indeed John did not win
the race because he quit before the end seems to have a different status than John
123
did not win the race because he did not participate: the latter feels like a correction
or cancellation, while the former is neutral.28
Looking beyond the scope of change of state and achievement verbs, it is gen-
erally predicted that entailments of atomic sentences that are not about the event
time will be presupposed. This prediction seems to be borne out too. An example
might be the sentence with the simple transitive predicate kill such as (54). Some
plausible lexical entailments might be u; w; and n as shown below.
(54) John killed Bill

a. u ¼ John killed Bill at t1
b. w ¼ Bill is dead at t1
c. v ¼ Bill was alive at t2 (where t2 refers to some time before t1 )
Among the above, v is not about t1 and is therefore predicted to be presupposed.

Notice again the contrast between the entailment of (54) that Bill was alive at t2 and
the inference that Bill continued to be dead after the event time of the killing. While
the first is indeed a lexical entailment, the second is only a pragmatic inference that
follows from our world knowledge, as shown by the difference in the acceptability
of the following pair.
(55) a. #John killed Bill, but he was never alive before.

b. John killed Bill, but then he resurrected.
Another example might be the case of response-stance predicates. These predi-

cates are usually taken to assert the truth of some proposition p and presuppose that
someone (usually other than the subject, though this might not be necessary) has
asserted or proposed that p is false. An example of such a verb is deny:
(56) John denied that it was raining

a. w ¼ John asserted at t1 that it was not raining
b. u ¼ Someone (other than John) asserted at t2 that it was raining
(where t2 is some interval before t1 )
Similarly as we have seen in the case of change of state verbs, u is not about the
event time t1 , and is therefore predicted to be presupposed, which seems to be
correct.
28
Mandy Simons (p.c.) has asked about examples such as (i):
(i) a. John is winning the race (at time t1 ).

b. John is participating in the race (at time t1 ).
One possibility in the present system is that in these cases too, the implication that John is participating at
the time of winning is an implicature of the presupposition that is about the time strictly before the
winning. Alternatively, perhaps the progressive interacts with presuppositions in non-trivial ways. I will
leave answering this question for the future.
123
522 M. Abrusán
4.2.2 Cognitive change of state verbs
Cognitive change of state verbs work on the one hand as regular change of state
verbs (presupposing the truth of a previous state), and on the other hand as factive
verbs (having a factive presupposition). These presuppositions arise in the same way
as with change of state verbs and with factives, respectively, and are therefore
straightforwardly predicted by the present analysis. This predicts correctly that (57a)
and (57b) will be the presuppositions of (57).
(57) Peter discovered at t1 that Mary is tired at t1

a. Peter did not know that Mary is tired at t2 (where t2 < t1 )
b. Mary is tired at t1
The entailment in (57a) about a previous stage is not about the matrix tense argu-
ment t1 of (57), for the same reasons as the entailment about a previous stage of
change of state verbs was not about the matrix time argument, and is therefore
predicted to be presupposed in the same way. The entailment in (57b) is not about
the matrix event time just like the veridical entailments of factives, and is predicted
to be presupposed for this reason. Thus the two presuppositions of cognitive change
of state verbs can be derived exactly as the presuppositions of factives and change of
state verbs respectively.
5 The top-down process: presupposition suspension
So far we have been concerned with the bottom-up mechanism that predicts the
presuppositions of soft triggers. This mechanism took as its input the semantic
entailments of a sentence S, and flagged one or more of these as presupposed. But as
was mentioned in the outset, the output of this process can be modified by contextual
factors, which might result in the presuppositions being suspended, or rather, not even
generated in the first place. What happens in these cases is that the context warrants a
secondary main point, different from the default one. Since presuppositions have to be
independent from both the default and the secondary main points, what would be a
presupposition by the bottom-up process will not be independent from the main point
any more, and hence will not be predicted to be presupposed. This section spells out
two such contextual effects, brought about by focus and evidential verbs. This is not
meant to be exhaustive, and the possibility that further such processes might be
identified in the future should be kept open. But note that such contextual shifts in what
presupposition is triggered are assumed to be brought about by linguistic factors
within the sentence itself. Thus unlike for Simons et al. (2010), simply changing the
background question is not predicted to lead to a shift in presuppositions.
5.1 Focus
Famously, it has been argued in the literature that presuppositions of soft triggers
can be suspended (also referred to as contextual neutralization (see Abbott 2006) or
123
local accommodation in dynamic semantics) in some circumstances. Here is a

classic example from Karttunen (1971b):
(58) If I discover/realize later that I have not told the truth, I will confess it to
everyone.
The traditional view about examples such as above is that presupposition is sus-
pended because it clashes with an implicature, in the above case the implicature of
the conditional that the speaker is ignorant about the truth of the antecedent of the
conditional. The most influential accounts in this spirit have been given by Stalnaker
(1974), Gazdar (1979), van der Sandt (1992) (cf. also Chierchia and McConnell-
Ginet 2000; Kadmon 2001; Simons 2001; Beaver 2001, 2004; Abbott 2006; Abusch
2010; Klinedinst 2009 and references therein for further discussion). Examples such
as (58) contrast with (59), which is hard to understand as non-presuppositional.
(59) If I regret later that I have not told the truth, I will confess it to everyone.
The reason for this, according to some of the above authors, is that in these cases the
presupposition of the antecedent clause (that the speaker believes that he has not
told the truth) does not clash with the ignorance implicature of the conditional (that
it is open whether he will come to regret that he has not told the truth). The
difference between examples such as (59) and (58) is also the prime reason why
some presuppositional verbs such as regret are often not classified among soft
triggers.
It has been suggested however that a more careful look at the data casts doubt on
analyzing presupposition suspension as a result of a clash between presuppositions
and implicatures. Beaver (2004) in particular cites many naturally occurring
examples where suspension occurs with the 3rd person as well, which is not pre-
dicted by the cancellation-by-implicature proposals. He also suggests that rather
than a clash with implicatures, the determining factor for whether suspension is
observed is the informational, focus structure of the sentence (cf. also Kadmon
2001). As Beaver observes, (60b), in which the verb is focused, suggests that the
student is guilty. This contrasts with (60a), in which the embedded clause is
focused, where there is no such implication29 :
(60) a. If the TA discovers that [your work is plagiarized]F , I will be [forced

to notify the Dean]F .
b. If the TA [discovers]F that your work is plagiarized, I will be [forced
to notify the Dean]F .
Beaver also notes that focusing the verb in the classic examples such as (59) has the
effect that either the presupposition projects, or the sentence is quite odd. Thus he
concludes that focusing and information structure plays the crucial part in presup-
29
Example (60a) is slightly modified from the original, the focused part being the entire embedded
clause in the present discussion, but only the verb plagiarized in the original version. These two cases are
hard to tell apart phonetically in English, but Hungarian indicates that more likely the latter is the case.
123
524 M. Abrusán
position suspension, rather than a clash with implicatures. Convinced by Beaver’s

(2004) arguments, in this paper I also assume that the cases of presupposition
suspension follow from focus. The remainder of this section attempts to explain how
the paradigm illustrated in (60) might arise. I also provide evidence that suspension
due to focus can affect alleged hard triggers such as regret as well. This I take to
suggest that all verbal triggers belong to the soft-presuppositional category.
Focus is usually taken to be the part of a sentence that conveys the new or
highlighted information, thus the information that directly answers a background
question. In this sense, focus grammatically signals the presence of a back-
ground question. What I will assume here is that grammatically marked background
questions can introduce a secondary (or pragmatic) main point. Secondary main
points concern the event time of the sentence expressing the most direct proposition
that answers the background question. The presupposition triggering mechanism
looks both at the default (grammatical) and the secondary (pragmatic) main points
and requires the presupposition to be independent from both of these. This derives
the above data in the present framework. Let’s look at the above example in more
detail, zooming in on the antecedent of the conditional. (As mentioned in the outset,
I assume that presuppositions are generated at the embedded level, and are then
subject to projection rules.)
(61) a. The TA discovers (at t1 ) that [your work is plagiarized (at t2 ÞF .
b. The TA [discovers]F (at t1 ) that your work is plagiarized (at t2 ).
Assume that t1 and t2 are interpreted as picking out non-overlapping intervals.30 In

(61a), focusing the embedded clause indicates that the background question is What
will the TA discover? The direct answer to this question is a proposition, namely the
proposition denoted by the embedded clause that your work is plagiarized at t2 .
Since the secondary main point is the information that is about the matrix tense
argument of the sentence expressing the direct answer to the background question,
in this case the secondary, pragmatic main point concerns the information that is
about t2 . So what has to be checked is whether the information conveyed by the
embedded clause is about t2 . The answer is yes: changing the properties of the world
at t1 will influence the truth of w ¼ your work is plagiarized at t2 . There are two
models M, M0 2 Mt2 such that M w and M0 6 w: simply take a model M st.
M w, form a t2 variant M 0 in which your work is not plagiarized at t2 : it follows
that M0 6 w . Since w is not independent from the secondary main point (as it is
about it), it is not predicted to be presupposed.
The situation is different in (61b). Here the focus on the matrix verb indicates
that the background question is What will the TA do? The direct answer to this
question is a proposition that restates the main clause of the antecedent of the
conditional and therefore the pragmatic main point of the sentence concerns the
30
Admittedly this might be not very realistic in the case of a stative complement as be plagiarized, but is
harmless and so I will stick to it for the sake of simplicity. The reason why it is a harmless assumption is
that because of the non-accidental criterion in the presupposition triggering mechanism we could always
just look at a T-alternative for which t1 and t2 pick out non-overlapping intervals more realistically: The
TA discovers that your work was plagiarized.
123
main clause and the matrix tense. Since this is the same as the default (grammatical)
main point, we derive the same presupposition as in the default, unfocused case: the
truth of the embedded complement is independent from the main point (i.e. it is not
about the matrix tense argument) and is therefore presupposed.
In Hungarian, a language which marks focus syntactically, the pattern identified
by Beaver can be replicated more generally, even with verbs such as tud ‘know’ and
alleged hard triggers such as regret. In Hungarian most verbs that take propositional
complements, can have a pronominal argument in the main clause (in this case azt
‘that.acc’) that is anaphoric to the embedded proposition. This pronoun can be
focused: when it is, as in (62a), the truth of the complement is not presupposed any
more. This is in contrast to (62b), in which instead of the propositional anaphor the
verb is focused: here factivity is preserved:
(62) a. Kétlem, hogy Péter [azt]F tudja, hogy esik az es}o.

doubt.1sg that Peter that.acc knows that falls the rain
‘I doubt that what Peter knows is that it is raining.’
b. Kétlem, hogy Péter [tudja]F (azt), hogy esik az es}o.
doubt.1sg that Peter knows (that.acc) that falls the rain
‘I doubt that Peter [knows]F that it is raining.’
The example above can be predicted in the same way as the previous English data.
Further, examples analogous to (59) with regret also show sensitivity to focus. The
sentence (63a), in which the pronoun that is anaphoric to the embedded clause in the
antecedent is focused, is a coherent statement, which shows that the presupposition
here can be suspended. However (63b), in which the verb itself is focused, is odd
because it feels contradictory.
(63) a. Ha Péter [azt]F sajnálja, hogy

if Peter that regrets.3sg that
megbukott, akkor feleslegesen bánkódik mert
failed than in-vain sorry.3sg because
végül is átengedték.
in-the-end prt passed.3pl
‘If (what) Peter regrets (is) that he failed (the exam), then he is sorry
in vain because in the end they passed him.’
b. #Ha Péter [sajnálja]F , hogy megbukott,
if Peter regrets.3sg that failed
akkor feleslegesen bánkódik mert végül
than in-vain sorry.3sg because in-the-end
is átengedték.
prt passed.3pl
‘If Peter regrets that he failed (the exam), then he is sorry in vain
because in the end they passed him.’
Thus the present account is able to derive why in certain contexts the presup-
positions of soft triggers disappear: in these cases focus indicates the presence of a
123
526 M. Abrusán
background question and a secondary main point that is different from the default
main point. Since the presupposition has to be independent from this secondary
main point as well, presuppositions are simply not generated.31
Note that the cases discussed above are different from those in which the pre-
supposition is globally accommodated (cf. Karttunen 1974; Thomason 1990, among
others): in these (unembedded) cases the content of the presupposition is implied,
but it fails to be pragmatically presupposed:
(64) We regret to inform you that the swimming pool is closed. (Thomason 1990)
Arguably, such examples show a more general property of conversation that

speakers can silently adjust their context to accommodate presupposed information
(cf. Stalnaker 1974, 2002; Karttunen 1974; Lewis 1979; Heim 1983; van der Sandt
1992; von Fintel 2008, among others). Therefore examples such as (64) can be
assumed to be presuppositional as usual. Such examples thus do not show the
‘‘softness’’ of soft presuppositions, but show that the common ground assumed by
conversational participants is influenced by utterances in rather subtle ways. In
contrast, the cases of suspension discussed above require flexibility in predicting
what is actually implied by a sentence/what presupposition gets projected, not silent
contextual adjustments.
5.2 Parenthetical uses of verbs
Simons (2007) (partly following Hooper 1975) observes that certain clause
embedding verbs such as hear, see, believe, discover, know, etc. have semantically
parenthetical uses. In these cases the embedded clause carries the main point of the
utterance, while the matrix clause serves an evidential function of identifying
information source, emotional attitude, etc. An example is the conversation below:
(65) A: Why didn’t Louise come to the meeting yesterday?

B: I heard that she’s out of town.
Some of the verbs that admit such parenthetical uses are members of the class
commonly thought of as factive verbs (e.g. see, know, discover, etc.). Simons notes
that when used in this parenthetical manner, these verbs loose their presupposi-
tionality: In the examples below the information that Luise is out of town is
31
Another case of presupposition-suspension based on focus might be the example in (i), in which the
question an be understood in a non-presuppositional case. In Hungarian, the example only works if the
adverb recently is present, and is in focus position. Without the adverb, the question is still presuppo-
sitional.
(i) I notice you are chewing on your pencil. Have you recently stopped smoking? (Geurts 1994)
Possibly, what is happening here is that the adverb makes the entire stretch of time signaled by
recently the main point of the utterance. This allows a non-presuppositional understanding of the ques-
tion, if the time of smoking falls within the stretch of time designated by the adverb.
123
presented as new information, and not as information that is already entailed by the
common ground or presupposed. Some illustrative examples from Simons’ paper:
(66) A: Why isn’t Louise coming to our meetings these days?

B: Henry discovered/realized/figured out/learned that she’s left town.
(67) Yikes! I just remembered/realized that I didn’t turn off the stove!
Note that in this case global accommodation is not really an option, because of the
explicit question of A. As regards projection facts, it also seems that the above verbs
can act in a way as if their complement was not presupposed. With factives such as
know, such facts are harder to find but not impossible (cf. also (42) above). Simon’s
example with know:
(68) Context: We are in a restaurant, and you notice that I keep staring at a
diner at another table. Finally I say:
I KNOW I’ve run into that guy somewhere, but I can’t for the life of me
think where it was.
According to Simons, ‘‘In the context, an utterance of [(68)] might well be more
natural than utterance of the same sentence without I know. However, I know
doesn’t seem to add to the communicated content. Rather, by prefacing the (main
point) claim with I KNOW. . ., the speaker makes explicit her strong commitment to
the truth of that claim. The emphatic stress may serve to bring out the implicit
contrast with weaker degrees of commitment.’’
Simons proposes that in the above cases the main verb is used in an evidential
way. Evidentials are words or morphemes that express the source of information or
the type of evidence that the speaker has for the information being conveyed. In
many languages of the world these markers of information are highly grammati-
calized, and might even be obligatory. (cf. Speas 2008; Aikhenvald 2006). The most
common information types expressed are direct information (which might e.g. be
visual, auditory, other sensory, etc.) and indirect information (e.g. reported, inferred,
etc.), with variation among languages of how the evidence types are divided. Most
often, evidentials are analyzed as either illocutionary operators (cf. Faller 2002;
Davis et al. 2007, etc.) or as modal operators (cf. Garrett 2000; Izvorski 1997, etc.),
with languages possibly differing in the semantic properties of their evidentials.
Another source of theoretical (and perhaps empirical) variation is whether the
content of evidential markers becomes part of the propositional content. Further,
given that evidentials either serve an illocutionary or a modal function, the content
modified by the evidential is (also) the main point of the utterance. This can also be
seen with the evidential verbs surveyed above, as was pointed out by Simons, many
of which allow a so-called slifting construction. In such cases the main verb is
inserted as a parenthetical comment into the subordinated clause, as in (69):
(69) John, I heard, is out of town.
123
528 M. Abrusán
Simons’ (2007) idea has interesting consequences for the present proposal. In
cases where the matrix verb is used in an evidential way, there might also be a
second (pragmatic) main point besides the grammatically defined default one, which
is derived contextually. The second main point concerns the clause ‘‘modified’’ by
the evidential, the syntactically embedded clause. Technically the secondary main
point is the information that is about the time of the syntactically embedded verb.
Let’s repeat B’s response in (65) here:
(70) I heard (at t1 ) that she’s out of town (at t2 )
Assume that t1 and t2 are assigned different time intervals. The secondary main
point is the information that is about the matrix time of the clause modified by the
evidential, in this case t2 . The sentence w ¼ that she is out of town at t2 is about t2 ,
since changing the properties of the world at t2 could influence its truth. More
precisely, there are two models M, M0 2 Mt2 such that M w and M0 6 w: simply
take a model M st. M w, form a t2 variant M0 in which Louise is not out of town at
t2 : it follows that M0 6 w . Thus since w is not independent from the secondary main
point (as it is about it), it is not predicted to be presupposed.
6 Adding presuppositions contextually
The previous section looked at cases where semantic presuppositions were sus-
pended. However, presuppositions sometimes can also be contextually added to
otherwise non-presuppositional expressions (cf. Simons 2001; Schlenker 2010). This
happens in certain situations where a contextual entailment is made salient: it is this
contextual entailment that acts as if it was presupposed. Thus there seem to be cases
where presuppositions arise not from semantic entailments, but from contextual or
commonsense entailments. This section looks at such cases. It is proposed that these
can be predicted by the present mechanism as well: all we need to do is to allow the
triggering mechanism to operate on a contextually enriched set of entailments.
Certain normally non-presuppositional expressions, as was noticed by Schlenker
(2008, 2010), might nevertheless behave as if they were presuppositional in some
contexts. Schlenker calls such expressions ‘part-time triggers’. An example is the
verb announce. In some contexts, it does not entail the truth of its complement and
in these contexts it does not presuppose the truth of its complement either. In other
contexts, it entails and presupposes the truth of its complement. Such cases, he
argues, point towards a triggering theory that predicts presuppositions not only
based on the meaning of the expressions involved, but based on the literal meaning
of the expressions together with the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which
these expressions appear. Let’s look at an example:
(71) Mary has announced that she is pregnant

a. Scenario 1: Mary is 30 years old and she is expected to be reliable.
Therefore the context entails the truth of the embedded proposition.
! (71) presupposes that Mary is pregnant
123
b. Scenario 2: Mary is 7 years old and is not expected to be reliable.

Therefore the context does not entail the truth of the embedded proposition.
! (71) does not presuppose that Mary is pregnant
As Schlenker points out, the verb announce contrasts minimally with the verb
inform, which seems to lexically entail and presuppose the truth of its complement
in the above context.
The mechanism proposed in this paper can be extended to handle the above facts.
What is needed is to allow contextual entailments to enter the pool of candidate
entailments for presuppositions. Then if the embedded proposition is contextually
entailed, it is also be predicted to be presupposed. Otherwise it isn’t. Thus (71a) is
predicted to presuppose its complement, but not (71b). So far this is simply an
extension of the above mechanism to include contextual entailments.
Interestingly, there are further cases, discussed in Schlenker (2006), which show
that inform itself is a part time trigger. In contexts in which the truth of the com-
plement is in question and the subject is assumed to be a very reliable source of
information regarding the truth of the complement, the factive inference of both
announce and inform disappears. Look at the context below:
(72) George is the family butler. He is very reliable. If he says p, then we can
infer that p is the case, and if he does not say p, we can infer that p is not
the case.
Has George announced/informed the guests that dinner is ready?
! there is no implication that dinner is ready.
This example connects back to the cases of evidential verbs: a plausible thing to say
about it is that the butler being a completely reliable source for the information in
question (whether dinner is ready), the embedded clause becomes the pragmatic
main point. In effect, the question is interpreted as ‘Is dinner ready (according to the
most reliable source)?’ This makes the truth of the embedded clause not independent
from the secondary main point (indeed it is equivalent to it) and therefore the truth of
the embedded clause is not predicted to be presupposed, despite being entailed.
7 Discussion
This paper proposed that presuppositions of soft triggers can be predicted from
assumptions about the attentional status of the information expressed by the sen-
tence in which they occur: information that we do not pay attention, by default or in
a context is presupposed. The triggering mechanism looked at atomic sentences.
Presuppositions of complex sentences are assumed to be derived by applying a
separate projection mechanism. This means that different sets of rules determine
how presuppositions are generated, and how they are transmitted.
The proposal is context sensitive in two ways: First, as was discussed in Sect. 5,
certain grammatical markers such as evidentials or focus might indicate the
123
530 M. Abrusán
presence of secondary (pragmatic) main points, which can have the effect of sus-
pending certain presuppositions. Second, as shown in Sect. 6, certain presupposi-
tions might be derived based on contextual entailments, as was the case of part-time
triggers.
Finally, it should be noted that the mechanism is not exhaustive: it does not
exclude that other mechanisms might turn entailments not predicted to be presup-
positions by the current account into presuppositions. This is presumably the case
with all the presuppositions that are not in the scope of this proposal, that is any
presupposition other than the presuppositions of soft triggers (verbs).32
7.1 Some predictions
In general the theory makes the prediction that (at least in neutral contexts where
secondary main points are not evoked) verbs that entail the truth of their proposi-
tional complement will also presuppose the truth of this complement, unless it is
lexically specified by the matrix verb that tense argument of the embedded com-
plement has to be co-indexed with the matrix tense. This is because, if the tenses are
in principle independent, there will always be a T-alternative such that the propo-
sition corresponding to the proposition denoted by the complement is not about the
event time of the matrix clause of the T-alternative. The difference in presupposi-
tionality between a factive verb such as know and a non-factive one such as believe
follows from the fact that the latter do not entail that their complement is true, i.e.
their veridicality.33
Further, the system makes the prediction that any entailment whose sentential
description does not contain a matrix tense argument or a quantified tense argument
is presupposed. Conversely, entailments of a sentence S whose linguistic form
contains the matrix tense argument of the sentence and is not tautologous is not
predicted to be presupposed (at least not by the present mechanism). Therefore it is
predicted that presuppositions of change of state or achievement verbs will be about
some time other than the event time of the verb. As far as I know this prediction is
borne out. It is also predicted that entailments of change of state verbs that are not
about the event time cannot be not presupposed. Recall that the inference we might
get from stop that the final state continues to hold is not itself an entailment, unlike
the inference that the previous state held for some time before the event time, as it
32
Some cases of alleged verbal presuppositions might belong to the case of existential presuppositions as
well. One such case might be the verb accompany, which has been argued in Abusch (2010) to be
presuppositional: In particular (i) is claimed to presuppose that Mary went to the airport.
(i) John accompanied Mary to the airport

presupposition: Mary went to the airport
But it seems that this presupposition arises from a syntactically more complex sentence, namely John
accompanied Mary, who was going to the airport. Since in this case we have a relative clause, the
inference we observe might also be an existential presupposition.
33
It has been often noted that factive verbs are also veridical, cf. Karttunen (1971b), Giannakidou (1998,
1999), among others. But the present paper goes beyond this claim, in trying to explain why veridicality
leads to presuppositionality.
123
was shown in (48). The theory also makes the prediction that if two aspectual verbs
were to differ only in the lengths of the interval denoted by the event time, their
corresponding presuppositions should also differ. This prediction seems to be borne
out as well, as was shown by the Hungarian examples in (50)–(51).
7.2 Challenges? Fillmore (1971) and Abusch (2002, 2010)
Since presuppositions are predicted from meanings of sentences, the proposal also
makes the prediction that atomic sentences that have the same meaning should
trigger the same presuppositions. This seems largely correct. However, some cases
have been offered in the literature that might seem to challenge this prediction.
Fillmore (1971) has argued that there was a near-symmetry between the predicates
accuse-criticize, in that ‘a accused b of p’ presupposed that a judged the action
denoted by p bad, and asserted that b did p, ‘a criticized b for p’ presupposed that b
did p and asserted that a indicated that p was bad. On closer observation though this
near-symmetry turns out to be imprecise. First, it is not true that both predicates
contribute the meaning that a judges/indicates that p is bad. While this might be
approximately correct for criticize, accuse seems to contribute a stronger meaning
suggesting that p is reproachable in general, as can be seen from the examples below.
(73) a. John criticized Mary for cleaning the bathroom.

b. John accused Mary of cleaning the bathroom.
Further, while criticize seems to entail and presuppose the truth of the embedded
complement, accuse does not seem to entail the truth of the embedded complement,
only that the subject asserted it. Interestingly, given these refinements the present
proposal actually predicts the correct presupposition facts for the above pair: accuse
triggers the sortal presupposition that p is reproachable, but does not in fact entail
the truth of its complement, while criticize entails and presupposes the truth of its
complement, but does not entail that p is morally reproachable, only that the subject
finds it undesirable.
A more serious candidate for a pair where the same overall meaning might co-
occur with different presuppositions was put forth by Abusch (2002, 2010). She has
argued that the pairs be right–be aware are symmetric in the following way:
(74) a. John is right that dinner is ready

asserts: Dinner is ready
presupposes: John believes that dinner is ready
b. John is aware that dinner is ready
asserts: John believes that dinner is ready
presupposes: Dinner is ready
However, as argued in Schlenker (2008, 2010) it seems that syntactically the two do
not behave alike, and that (74a) is syntactically more complex, akin to (75):
(75) John is right in claiming that dinner is ready
123
532 M. Abrusán
As Schlenker convincingly shows, the syntactic and semantic difference among the
two predicates seems to be supported by various syntactic diagnostics such as weak
crossover facts. This is a step towards distinguishing the two predicates, yet it does
not fully grant the right predictions for the present proposal. While it is correctly
predicted that be aware should presuppose w in (76), the sentence with is right is
predicted to presuppose both u and w, but it only presupposes u.
(76) a. u ¼ John claimed that dinner was ready (at some time t2 before the
event time)
b. w ¼ Dinner is ready
One possibility for why the predicted presupposition w is not manifest is that it is
canceled as in most embedded contexts it would be incompatible with the assertion
or some implicature of the assertion. Thus (77a) asserts that John made an incorrect
claim, while (77b,c) imply that the speaker does not know whether John’s claim is
correct. Each of these cases is incompatible with the presupposition that dinner is
ready.
(77) a. John is not right that dinner is ready

b. Is John right that dinner is ready?
c. If John is right that dinner is ready, we should proceed to the dining
hall.
Symmetric pairs, if real, would pose a challenge to any theory that attempts to
derive presupposition triggering on the basis of the meaning of S alone. If the
arguments in this paper and Schlenker (2010) are on the right track, to date no really
convincing case has been found among verbal triggers.34
8 Conclusion
This paper proposed that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our
attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the
information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the
absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conver-
sational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay
attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention to, be it by
default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. The paper
attempted to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the
main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from
this, and therefore likely presupposed. It was proposed that this can be calculated by
making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate inde-
pendence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (2000).
34
C. Potts (p.c.) pointed out that two vs. both and more than once/twice vs. again might be further
examples of (near-)synonymous pairs that differ only in their presuppositions. As the present paper is
only concerned with soft presupposition triggers, I leave them aside here.
123
The proposed mechanism was context sensitive, with two main sources of context
sensitivity. First, I assumed that the main point can be shifted in certain cases by
focus or evidential expressions. This predicts the examples of presupposition sus-
pension. Second, the pool of candidates for presuppositions might include contextual
entailments as well as semantic entailments. This predicts that some expressions that
are not necessarily presuppositional might trigger presuppositions in certain con-
texts. Finally, the proposed mechanism also made a number of predictions about the
type and form of the presuppositions of soft triggers.
Acknowledgements Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers and to Chris Potts for helpful comments
and suggestions on this paper. Thanks also to Denis Bonnay, Nathan Klinedinst, Daniel Rothschild and
Philippe Schlenker for many conversations on various previous versions, Emmanuel Chemla, Paul Egré,
Giorgio Magri, David Nicolas and Tim Williamson for comments on a previous draft and Edgar Onea,
Benjamin Spector, Pascal Amsili, Paula Menéndez-Benito, David Beaver, Mandy Simons, Craige Rob-
erts, Sigrid Beck, Robert Demolombe, Nicholas Asher, Paolo Santorio, Kyle Rawlins, Jacopo Romoli,
François Recanati, Chris Barker, Danny Fox, Eytan Zweig, Ofra Magidor, Anna Szabolcsi, Bridget
Copley, Matthew Towers and the audiences at LoLa10, The Aboutness Workshop in Toulouse, JSM10,
University of York, University of Tübingen, University of Göttingen, SALT20, the Riga Symposium on
Semantics, IJN and IRIT for very helpful comments and questions at various stages of this research. All
remaining errors are my own. This research was supported by the ESF (Euryi grant to P. Schlenker), The
Mellon Foundation and the Lichtenberg Kolleg, Georg-August Universität Göttingen.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and
the source are credited.
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Linguist and Philos (2011) 34:491–535

Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers

Published online: 1 May 2012

Keywords Presuppositions Æ Attention Æ Soft triggers Æ Aboutness Æ

2.1 Wilson and Sperber (1979)

(2) a. Susan knows [that it is raining]F

(3) a. John killed [Bill]F

2.2 Simons (2001)

(4) If a speaker A raises the question Whether p? by uttering S, and p asymmetri-

(5) a. S ¼ John knows it is raining

(6) John killed Bill

2.3 Abusch (2002, 2010)

(7) a. Who came?

(8) a. know triggers the alternatives ALT ¼ fknow, be unawareg

(9) a. John knows that it is raining or John is unaware that it is raining

2.4 Simons et al. (2010)

(10) Hypothesis about what projects and why:

(11) Definition of at-issueness

(12) Relevance to the QUD

(14) Q: What most surprised you about the first graders?

(15) Q: What do you know about John?

(16) A: What surprised you about John?

3 Attention and aboutness

corresponds to the default, bottom-up process of attention. Any information that is

3.1 The default main point

(17) S ¼ John knows (at t1 ) that it was raining (at t2 ).

(18) John is tired at t2

3.2 Being about an entity

Definition 1 (The syntax of the language Lc ) Let Lc be a first order predicate

The primitive vocabulary of Lc consists of the following:

Definition 2 (Interpretation) An interpretation M of Lc is a tuple M ¼ hD, ii such

The domain of M will be denoted by DM and the interpretation of M by iM .

Definition 3 (Satisfiability conditions) Let M be an interpretation of the language

Definition 4 (Variants of an interpretation with regard to an object) Roughly

Let S be a sentence of language Lc . S is not about an object named by the constant

(19) NAðS; cÞ holds iff 8MðM S iff 8M0 2 Mc M0 SÞ

(20) AðS; cÞ holds iff 9Mð9M0 2 Mc ðM S and M0 6 SÞÞ

Now consider the following examples:

(21) S ¼ Fido is tired

(22) S ¼ John is tired

(23) Fido is tired or Fido is not tired

(24) Some individual is tired

Let’s look at a sentence that has a tense argument as well.

(25) John is tired at t2

3.3 Triggering mechanism—default version

(26) Presupposition triggering (1st version, to be revised)

Being about is to be understood as defined in the preceding subsection. This predicts

(27) John knows (at t1 ) that it is raining (at t1 ).

What we need is a way to distinguish accidental co-temporaneity from non-acci-

(29) John managed (at time t1 ) to solve the exercise (at t1 )

3.4 Triggering mechanism—context sensitive version

(32) Presupposition triggering (3rd, final version)

4 The bottom-up process: some core examples

4.1 Factive presuppositions

Let’s come back to (17), repeated below:

(33) John knows (at time t1 ) that it is raining (at time t2 )

(34) Some lexical entailments of John knows at t1 that it is raining at t2 17

(35) Lexical entailments of: John knows at t1 that it is raining at t1

4.1.2 Implicative verbs