Presupposition Triggering Reflects Pragmatic Reasoning About Utterance Utility

Abstract

I present an RSA account of presupposition triggers building off prior work by Qing, Goodman, and Lassiter (2016). Intuitively, presupposition accommodation can occur through a listener’s reasoning about the speaker’s model of the common ground. Listeners assume that speakers try produce utterances with high contextual utility, and they will modify their own understanding of the context to rationalize low utility utterances. The account derives phenomena including accommodation of genus-species presuppositions due to Abusch (2002), QUD sensitivity of presuppositions, and gradience in the strength of some presuppositions