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Journal of Semantics Advance Access published online on August 26, 2009
Journal of Semantics, doi:10.1093/jos/ffp009
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Presupposition Triggering from Alternatives

Dorit Abusch

Cornell University

Correspondence: DORIT ABUSCH, Department of Linguistics, Morrill Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 e-mail: da45{at}cornell.edu


  Abstract

This paper considers a set of presupposition triggers including focus, questions, ‘contrastive’ statives and an ‘affirmation/negation’ construction involving and not, where presuppositions are cancellable. It is proposed that these constructions, rather than having strict semantic presuppositions, have representations involving alternative sets in the sense of alternative semantics of questions and focus and that a default process generates a presupposition from the alternative set. Presupposition projection facts are dealt with by stating a default constraint referring to dynamic denotations. The analysis can be extended to other constructions and lexical items with defeasible presupposition-triggering behaviour, such as inchoatives, by hypothesizing a representation involving alternatives.

Received for publication 18 January 2007. Revision received 1 March 2008. Accepted for publication 25 March 2008.


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