Culminations and presuppositions

Abstract

In this paper, I make some novel observations about presuppositions triggered by a subset of achievements, namely, culminations like win, and argue that culminations are not only soft presupposition triggers of the occurrence of the activity generally preceding them, pace the received view (cf. e.g., Abusch 2010), but instead their presupposition is of a special kind that could be called an extra soft presupposition, which, in contrast to soft and hard presuppositions alike, can be cancelled even when unembedded. Moreover, I argue that there are lexical differences among different presupposition triggers, even among culmination predicates themselves, with respect to the degree of the strength of their presuppositions. In line with recent ideas (e.g., Chemla, 2009; Abusch, 2010; Romoli, 2015) about the computability of presuppositions, I propose that at least the presupposition of culminations can be derived, to which end I exploit abductive reasoning.