[PLing] talk by Clemens Mayr, 18.6

Enrico Flor enrico.flor at univie.ac.at
Wed May 16 13:20:39 CEST 2018


Dear everyone,

we'd like to invite you to a talk by Clemens Mayr (ZAS Berlin) that will
be given on Monday 18.06 at 15:00-16:30 in the Seminarraum II at the
German Studies department (Schottentor).
Again, if you are just a bit unsure about how to get there, have a look
at this illustrated guide, because finding Seminarraum II is not very
straightforward:
	http://www.univie.ac.at/konjunktion/wegbeschreibung.html

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.
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