Speaker: Mitya Privoznov (MIT)
Title: The syntax of presupposition projection
Time: Thursday, April 6th, 12:30pm – 2pm
Abstract: Consider the following pair of sentences:
(1) Context: I don’t know whether Rosa ever smoked or not.
a. #But I don’t think that [she stopped smoking altogether] and [she used to smoke Belomor].
b. But I don’t think that [she used to smoke Belomor] and [stopped smoking altogether].
The sentence in (1a) sounds infelicitous in the given context, while the sentence in (1b) does not, see Mandelkern et al. (2020), Kalomoiros (2021) and Kalomoiros and Schwarz (2021) for experimental evidence supporting this claim. The sentence in (1a) contains a presupposition trigger stopped, which introduces a presupposition p = ‘she used to smoke’ at the level of the clause she stopped smoking altogether. Being a presupposition, p projects to the level of the whole sentence in (1a) from under and, think and negation in the main clause. It comes into a contradiction with the given context (I don’t know whether Rosa ever smoked or not) and the sentence is predictably judged as infelicitous. The sentence in (1b) is truth-conditionally equivalent to (1a). Moreover, it contains the same presupposition trigger stopped, which introduces the same presupposition, which should project to the level of the whole sentence in (1b) and come into a contradiction with the given context, so (1b) should also be judged infelicitous, but it is not.
Contrasts like the one in (1) have led many researchers to the conclusion that a presupposition does not impose a requirement on the global context of the whole sentence that contains the trigger, but rather on the local context of the trigger. The local context is calculated based on the global context and the syntactic context of the trigger (other material in the sentence). In this talk, I will consider various ways of calculating the syntactic context of the trigger and show that the algorithms that have been proposed in the literature (a lexical one, a linear one and a quantifier-type one) all have unsatisfactory consequences. As a response to these problems, I will propose a syntactic algorithm, which avoids those consequences and leads to an unexpected relation between presupposition projection and the nature of syntactic derivation and the nature of Spell Out / Transfer.