[PLing] talk by Clemens Mayr, 4.05

[Enrico Flor]

Dear everyone,

we'd like to invite you to a talk by Clemens Mayr (ZAS Berlin) that will
be given on Friday 04.05 at 14:15-15:45 in the Seminarraum 3 at the
Linguistics Department (Sensensgasse 3a, first floor).

The title of the talk is: "Triggering presuppositions from
L-analyticity". See below for the abstract.

Enrico Flor, Nina Haslinger, Eva Rosina, Magdalena Roszkowski, Viola
Schmitt

ABSTRACT: "Why are there presupposition triggers? For instance, why does
Tony knows that it is raining
presuppose that it is raining rather than assert so, as evidenced by the
fact that the inference
remains under negation? This question is at the heart of the so-called
triggering problem.
This puzzle has not received a fully satisfactory answer to this date.
In this talk, I suggest
that the presupposition of an expression α is a regular entailment of α.
Its presuppositional
status results from an obligatory restriction on the function denoted by
α. In particular, this
restriction is imposed by the deductive system – a system of
interpretation only concerned with
formal properties of language. Without such a restriction a sentence
containing α would be
ruled L-analytic by the deductive system, which would result in
ungrammaticality. In order to
avoid L-analyticity an operator is inserted that is interpreted as a
restriction on the function in
effect yielding the presupposition. In other words, presuppositions are
not lexically stipulated.
But certain regular entailments must be made presuppositional to avoid
L-analyticity and thus
ungrammaticality."