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Presupposition Triggering Reflects Pragmatic Reasoning About Utterance Utility

EasyChair Preprint no. 9409

8 pagesDate: December 3, 2022

Abstract

Theories of presupposition triggering must contend with defeasibility and context sensitivity of projective inferences arising from the diverse class of soft triggers. This work presents a pragmatic account of triggering, building off notions of utterance utility from the Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framework: We propose that the likelihood of accommodation of projective content p is correlated with the degree to which attributing prior belief of p to the speaker increases the utility of their utterance. This proposal captures the basic facts, and generates novel predictions about the gradience of some projective inferences.

Keyphrases: gradience, presupposition, Rational Speech Acts, Triggering, utility

BibTeX entry
BibTeX does not have the right entry for preprints. This is a hack for producing the correct reference:
@Booklet{EasyChair:9409,
  author = {Alex Warstadt},
  title = {Presupposition Triggering Reflects Pragmatic Reasoning About Utterance Utility},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 9409},

  year = {EasyChair, 2022}}
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