Why Presupposition And Entailment Are More Central To Pragmatics

Presupposition And Entailment.1.Presupposition&EntailmentPresented byHanieh HabibiSupervisorDr.

1. Why Presupposition And Entailment Are More Central To Pragmatics In Children
2. Why Presupposition And Entailment Are More Central To Pragmatics In English
3. Why Presupposition And Entailment Are More Central To Pragmatics Test

Sional semantics. My chosen focus, presupposition, comes more from my own interests than that Yablo’s. Yablo rarely focuses on the traditional linguistic issues about presupposition in Aboutness. Nonetheless I hope presupposition can still serve as a case study in the applicability of truthmaker semantics to a major phenomenon in linguistic semantics. Different ways presupposition was approached by linguists. The paper also tries to attend to (i) what semantics is and what pragmatics is in a unified theory of meaning and (ii) the possibility to outline a semantic account of presupposition without having recourse to pragmatics and vice versa.

The paper deals with empirical questions that come attached with a presupposition. In case that the presupposition is not true, there is no unambiguous direct answer. In such a case an adequate complete answer is a negated presupposition. Yet these simple ideas are connected with a bunch of problems.

First, we must distinguish between a pragmatic and semantic presupposition, and thus also between a presupposition and mere entailment. Second, we show that the common definition of a presupposition of a question as such a proposition that is entailed by every possible answer to the question is not precise. We follow Frege and Strawson in treating survival under negation as the most important test for presupposition. But a negative answer to a question is often ambiguous. The ambiguity consists in not distinguishing between two kinds of negative answers, to wit the answers applying narrow-scope or wide-scope negation.

While the former preserves presupposition, the latter seems to be presupposition denying. We show that in order the negative answer to be unambiguous, instead of the wide-scope negation presumably denying presupposition, an adequate and unambiguous answer is just the negated presupposition. Having defined presupposition of a question more precisely, we then examine Yes-No questions, Wh-questions, and exclusive-or questions with respect to several kinds of presupposition triggers.

These include inter alia topic-focus articulation, verbs expressing termination of an activity, factive verbs, the 'whys and how comes', and past or future tense with reference time interval. Our background theory is Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) with its procedural semantics. TIL is an expressive logic apt for analysis of questions and presuppositions, because within TIL we work with partial functions, in particular, with propositions with truth-value gaps.

These features enabled us to define a general analytic schema of sentences associated with a presupposition. Our results are applicable in linguistics and artificial intelligence, in particular, in the systems the behavior of which is controlled by communication and reasoning of intelligent social agents.Keywords: Question; answer; presupposition; entailment; wide-scope vs. Narrow-scope negation; Transparent Intensional Logic; TIL. 1 IntroductionQuestioning and answering plays an important role in our communication, and has many logically relevant features. Thus, a formal analysis of interrogative sentences and appropriate answers should not be missing in any formal system dealing with natural language semantics.

To this end, many systems of erotetic logics have been developed. In general, these logics specify axioms and rules that are special for questioning and answering.

However, many important features of questions are based on their presuppositions. Everybody who is at least partially acquainted with the methods applied in social sciences has heard of the importance to consider the presuppositions of a question in questionnaires. Yet, to our best knowledge, none of the systems of erotetic logics deals with presuppositions of questions in a satisfactory way. This situation is due to the fact that in order to properly analyze presuppositions, we need to work with partial functions that may lack a value at some of their arguments. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap and propose an analysis of questions that come attached with presuppositions. And since answering is no less important then raising questions, we are also going to propose a method of adequate unambiguous answering to such questions with presuppositions.Our background theory is Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) with its procedural semantics that assigns abstract procedures to terms of natural language as their context-invariant meanings.

These procedures are rigorously defined as TIL constructions that produce lower-order objects as their products or in well-defined cases fail to produce an object by being improper. In case of empirical expressions the produced entity is a possible-world intension viewed as a partial function with the domain in possible worlds and times.

In this paper we concentrate on the analysis of empirical interrogative sentences and define an empirical question as an a-intension denoted by the respective declarative counterpart of the interrogative sentence, whose a-value an inquirer would like to know. Hence in TIL, questions and answers are not formal expressions that would be only implicitly defined by means of axioms and rules controlling the dialog consisting of a sequence of queries and answers, as it is often so in formal systems of erotetic logic. Rather, TIL belongs to the category of systems that Harrah in characterizes as objectual, similarly as, e.g., Higginbotham in.We analyze direct and complete answers to empirical questions with presuppositions.

We are going to show that in case that a presupposition of a question is not true, then there is no unambiguous direct answer to the question. In such a case an adequate answer should convey just information that the presupposition is not satisfied, hence an adequate complete answer will provide negated presupposition so that the inquirer can appropriately adjust the question, which is one of the contributions of this paper. However, we will not deal with the issue of answering a query with a query, that is, with query clarification request, except of the case of the negated presupposition answer that can be considered as a clarification request. Another novel contribution of this paper is a rigorous definition of a presupposition of a question. To this end, we distinguish two kinds of negation, to wit a wide-scope and narrow-scope negation. Since the direct answer applying a wide-scope negation is not unambiguous, the adequate negative answer is the one applying narrow-scope, or presupposition preserving negation.Our results are applicable in particular in the area of artificial intelligence, because by an explicit rendering of the structural character of questions and answers we can specify an intelligent behavior of agents in a multi-agent system consisting of social agents who communicate with their fellow-agents by messaging.

Such a system has no central dispatcher and its behavior is controlled just by messaging of agents who communicate in order to meet their individual as well as collective goals. They are able to enrich their ontology and knowledge base, and make decisions based on the derived consequences from the explicit knowledge base. To this end, it is desirable that they communicate and answer questions unambiguously, by conveying as much information as possible, so that the system be not prone to inconsistencies.The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we classify questions into three sorts that we are going to deal with, into wit Yes-No questions, Wh-questions, and exclusive-or questions. Section 3 deals with presuppositions of a question.

First, by distinguishing two kinds of negation and direct vs. Complete answers we rigorously define presupposition of a question as such a proposition that is entailed by every unambiguous (including negative) answer to the question. Thus, we are also able to distinguish between a presupposition and a mere entailment. Then we deal with particular presupposition triggers. Section 4 provides examples of question and answer analysis that takes into account presuppositions of a question. To this end we apply a general TIL analytic schema that makes use of the lf-then-else function. Finally, concluding remarks are contained in Section 5.

Why Presupposition And Entailment Are More Central To Pragmatics In Children

2 Classification of QuestionsInterrogative empirical sentences can be classified according to many criteria, and various categorizations of questions have been proposed. Questions can be open-ended or close-ended. The former gives the respondent greater freedom to provide information or opinions on a topic, while a close question calls for an answer of a specific type. Here we deal only with close questions classified into three basic types, to wit Yes-No questions, Wh-questions, and exclusive-or questions.Yes-No questions like 'Did you stop smoking?'

, 'Did the Pope visit Prague?' Present a proposition whose actual truth-value the inquirer would like to know. We explicate propositions as possible-world (PWS) intensions, i.e. Functions with the domain of possible worlds enriched with temporal parameters. Thus where ω is the set of possible worlds and τ the set of time moments, propositions are mappings from ω to chronologies of truth values of type ο, which is denoted by '((ο τ) ω)', or 'ο τω' for short.In case of Wh-questions like 'Who is the Pope?' , 'When did you stop smoking?'

, 'Who are the members of the European Union?' , 'Why did you come?' The type of the denoted intension is determined by possible direct answers. In general, it can be an object of any type α; an individual, a set of individuals, time moment, location, property, proposition, etc. Thus the denoted α-intension is of a type ((ατ)ω), or α τω for short.

In case of exclusive-or questions like 'Are you going by train or by car?' , 'Is Tom an assistant or a professor?' The adequate answer does not provide a truth-value; instead, it conveys information on which of the alternatives is the case.We also need to characterize the notions of direct and complete answer. As mentioned above, an empirical question poses an α -intension whose α-value the inquirer would like to know. Thus a direct answer provides directly this α-value. A complete answer is the proposition that the α-value of the asked α-intension is an a-object.

For instance, the direct answer to the Wh-question 'Who is the No.1 player in WTA ranking singles' is 'Williams Serena', while the complete answer is 'Williams Serena is the No.1 player in WTA ranking singles'. Obviously, to each direct answer there is the respective complete answer. 3.1 What is a Presupposition of a Question?Presupposition is generally characterized as the information that is presupposed or taken for granted. Levinson (, p. 179) characterizes a presupposition as a background belief, relating to an utterance, that (a) must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context, (b) generally will remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and (c) can generally be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance.

Why Presupposition And Entailment Are More Central To Pragmatics In English

Presupposition of a question is mostly defined by two conditions.- Usability; the truth of a presupposition is a necessary condition for an interrogative act to be successful.- Inference from possible answers; presupposition of a question is entailed by each possible answer to the question.Yet, as we are going to show, none of these definitions is satisfactory. In an effort to deal with presuppositions of a question, many distinguish between presuppositions of a semantic and pragmatic nature. Frege-Strawson tradition deals with semantic models, while Stalnaker offered pragmatic models.In case of declarative sentences, the modern treatment of presupposition has followed Frege-Strawson in treating survival under negation as the most important test for presupposition. That is, if it is implied that P, both in an assertion of a sentence S and in an assertion of the negation of S, then it is presupposed that P in those assertions. For instance.The King of France died in misery.The King of France did not die in misery both presuppose that 'the King of France' had reference. Other typical examples include (cf. 178-81).John managed didn't manage to stop in time implying that John tried to stop in time, and.Martha regrets doesn't regret drinking John's home brew implying that Martha drank John's home brew.But it seems that in (3) and (4) presupposition is of a pragmatic nature, because it can be cancelled by a context.

If somebody is asking whether John managed to stop in time, then according to Pagin the negative answer can be 'No, he did not; he didn't even try'. This indicates that in this case the presupposition is a pragmatic phenomenon. It is the speaker or speech act rather than the sentence or the proposition expressed that presupposes something. Yet, Pagin continues, in asking the speaker normally assumes that John tried and is only asking about the success.In this paper we deal with semantic presuppositions of questions. Our main thesis is this. Negative direct answers are often ambiguous.

Thus, a negative direct answer 'No' as a reaction to (3) can mean that. 3.2 Presupposition TriggersIt might seem that questions that come attached with a presupposition are only a special case of Yes/No questions, because Wh-questions do not have a presupposition. Some authors incline to this opinion. For instance, Fitzpatrick in argues that Wh-questions do not have an existential presupposition. Moreover, he argues that only the factive wh-operator how come is truly presuppositional in English and that evidence for semantic presuppositions in other wh-questions is better treated through pragmatic principles of question asking, because presupposition can be denied by negation. We will however show that even Wh-questions have a semantic presupposition.

To this end we apply the above explained principle of distinguishing narrow-scope and wide-scope negation. 3.2.1 Existential PresuppositionThe problem whether a question has an existential presupposition is not simple, because sentences of natural language are often ambiguous. The ambiguity we have in mind concerns different topic-focus articulations. For instance, the question 'When did the Pope visit Prague?' Is ambiguous.

If topic is 'the (current) Pope' then 'the Pope' occurs with supposition de re and the question has an existential presupposition that the Papal office is occupied. Each positive direct answer completed to a complete answer entails that the Pope exists.

The negative answer 'never' would be ambiguous in case we did not take into account the existential presupposition. It might mean that the existing Pope never visited Prague, or that the Pope does not exist. Yet, in the latter case the wide-scope negation is applied, which we do not admit as an adequate answer.

Hence it is necessary to take into account the semantic existential presupposition, and if it is not true, the correct unambiguous answer is 'It is not true that the Pope visited Prague because the Pope does not exist'.The situation is different if the topic is 'the visit of Prague'. In this case there is no presupposition that the Pope exists, and the sentence should be better formulated in passive: 'When has Prague been visited by a/the Pope?' Now the answer 'never' is unambiguous meaning that the set of dates when Prague was honored by papal visit is empty.

The term 'Pope' occurs with supposition de dicto. In languages that do not use articles such as Czech or Russian there is another ambiguity, namely, whether the question concerns the visits of the current Pope or any of the (current and previous) Popes. In such a case our agents reply by asking for disambiguation of the question.The topic-focus articulation is important not only in the case that the topic concerns definite descriptions like 'the Pope', 'the first man in Space', 'Miss World', etc.

That denote offices or roles occupied by at most one individual but also in case of general terms.For instance, the question 'Did all the trucks deliver ordered cargo?' Has an existential presupposition that there were some trucks delivering the ordered cargo provided 'delivering trucks' is the topic. If there are no such trucks, we should answer by denying the truth of the presupposition and inform the inquirer that there are no trucks, because the unambiguous negative answer necessarily implies that some trucks did not deliver their goods, which in turn entails that there are some trucks delivering. However, if we reglement such a question in the language of FOL, we obtain a formula like this:∀x Truck (x) ⊃ DeliveredCargo (x).This formula is true under every interpretation assigning an empty set of individuals to the predicate 'Truck'. Thus, in FOL whenever the presupposition that there are some trucks is not true, the sentence 'All the trucks delivered their cargo' will be true.

Why Presupposition And Entailment Are More Central To Pragmatics Test

Imagine, however, communication of agents in a multi-agent system based on this principle:Q: Did all the trucks deliver their cargo?A: Yes.(because there are no trucks delivering any cargo)Q: OK, thus all the delivered cargo can be offered for selling? A: Yes.(because there is no delivered cargo)Q: Perfect, I will inform the sellers that thegoods have arrived.A:???You would certainly agree that such a communication is not very intelligible and the system is prone to inconsistencies. An intelligible conversation should look like this:Q: Did all the trucks deliver their cargo?A: There are no trucks delivering cargo.Q: How come, what has happened?A: We are waiting for the results of the tendering process.Obviously, the explicit reglementation of a question should take into account presuppositions, and doing so is beyond the expressive power of FOL system. We need a more expressive system of the logic of partial functions that makes it possible to work with propositions lacking a truth-value. 3.2.2 Activity VerbsTo another kind of questions with presuppositions belong those that contain as a constituent an activity verb.

Verbs expressing an activity come attached with a presupposition whenever we ask whether the respective activity came to an end or continues. In that case there is a presupposition that the activity in question began.

To adduce a frequent example, consider the question 'Did Tom stop beating his wife?' It is generally taken for granted that this question is connected with presuppositions that Tom had been married and that he did beat his wife. And we side with this opinion. Again, it might be contested whether a negative answer 'no' means that Tom did not stop beating his wife or that it is not true that Tom stopped beating his wife (because he has never been married or never beat his wife).

But this is again the case of narrow vs. Wide-scope negation.

Our agents should reply unambiguously and provide maximum information. Hence, in the latter case an adequate response is the complete answer denying the truth of the presupposition. For instance, that Tom has never been married. 3.2.3 Questions in Past or Future TenseQuestions in past or future with reference time when this or that happened or will happen come with a presupposition that the reference time is in a proper relation to the time of evaluation. Consider, for instance, the question 'Shall we meet today at 17:00'? Both a positive and negative answer entail that the question has been evaluated before 17:00.

If it is not so, the respondent cannot reply 'No'. Rather, they should reply by denying the truth of the presupposition: 'It is later than 17:00'.A correct analysis of such questions with reference time is again important in particular for a smooth and consistent communication of agents in a multi-agent system. For instance, a question in future tense can reach the addressee too late due to technical problems (e.g. The agent is out of the range of a mobile signal).

In such a case the responder informs the inquirer that the message came too late. 3.2.4 Factive VerbsQuestions on attitudes with factive verbs like 'know that', 'regret that', etc. Have a presupposition that the proposition denoted by the embedded clause is true. For instance, the question 'Does Tom know that he came late?' Presupposes that Tom came late. Again, both positive answer 'Yes, he does know it' and negative answer with narrow scope negation 'No, he doesn't know it' entail that Tom came late.

If it is not so, the appropriate reaction is just informing the inquirer about the situation by negating the presupposition, to wit 'Tom didn't come late'.It might seem doubtful whether 'regret' is a factive verb as well. In general, it is not. A declarative sentence like 'Tom regrets his coming late' can be false in two situations. Either Tom came late but he isn't sorry for that, or Tom did not come late. Yet, in our opinion, when asking whether Tom regrets his coming late, the topic of the question is Tom's coming late, which is presupposed. Of course, the situation would be different if the topic were Tom's regretting something.

This is a pragmatic factor that comes into the game here. Yet on the natural former reading the question presupposes that Tom did come late. Hence, again, if it is not the case, then instead of the ambiguous wide-scope negation answer the agent conveys the fact that the presupposition is not true, i.e. Tom did not come late.As always, we should distinguish between a presupposition and a mere entailment. For instance, finding after the forgoing search is connected with the presupposition that the search took place. Thus finding in this sense means that the activity of seeking came to a successful end, which is the case that we dealt with in paragraph 3.2.2. However, there is no presupposition that the sought object exists; it is only entailed by the success in search.

In case of not finding, the failure could be due to seeker's incompetence or nonexistence of the sought object. For instance, the question 'Did police find the murderer of JFK?' Is connected with the presupposition that the police looked for the murderer. If they did not, then the adequate answer is 'Police was not seeking the murderer of JFK'. The answer 'no' means that the police did seek but did not succeed -either because the murderer escaped without being identified or the murderer does not even exist. Such verbs like 'find', 'find out', 'discover' are characterized by Karttunen in as semifactives. 4.1 The Foundations of TILIn this paper we apply only a fragment of TIL consisting of first-order types and four kinds of constructions.

The syntax of TIL is Church's (higher-order) typed λ-calculus, but with the all-important difference that the syntax has been assigned a procedural (as opposed to set-theoretical denotational) semantics, according to which a linguistic sense is an abstract procedure detailing how to arrive at an object of a particular logical type. TIL constructions are such procedures.

Thus, λ -abstraction transforms into the molecular procedure of forming a function, application into the molecular procedure of applying a function to an argument, and variables into atomic procedures for arriving at their values assigned to them by valuation.TIL constructions represent our interpretation of Frege's notion of Sinn and are kindred to Church's notion of concept. Constructions are linguistic senses, as well as modes of presentation of objects. While the Frege-Church connection makes it obvious that constructions are not formulae, it is crucial to emphasize that constructions are not functions conceived as set-theoretical mappings. Rather, technically speaking, some constructions are modes of presentation of functions, including 0-place functions such as individuals and truth-values, and the rest are modes of presentation of other constructions.

Thus, with constructions of constructions, constructions of functions, functions, and functional values in our stratified ontology, we need to keep track of the traffic between multiple logical strata. The ramified type hierarchy does just that.The types of order 1 include all objects that are not constructions. Therefore, they include not only the standard objects of individuals, truth-values, sets, etc., but also functions defined on possible worlds (i.e., the intensions germane to possible-world semantics).Definition 2 (types of order 1). Let 6 be a base, where a base is a collection of pairwise disjoint, non-empty sets.Variables x, y. Are constructions that construct objects of the respective types dependently on a valuation v; they v-construct.Where X is an object whatsoever (an extension, an intension or a construction), 0X is the construction Trivialization. It constructs X without any change.Composition X Y 1.Y m is the following construction. If X v-constructs a function f of type (αβ 1., β m), and Y 1., Y m v-construct entities B 1.

B m of types β 1., β m, respectively, then the Composition X Y 1.Y m v-constructs the value (an entity, if any, of type a) of f on the tuple argument 〈B 1. Otherwise, the Composition X Y 1. Y m does not v-construct anything and so is v-improper.Closure λx 1.x m Y is the following construction. Let x 1, x 2.x m be pairwise distinct variables v-constructing entities of types β 1., β m and Y a construction v-constructing an a-entity. X m Y is the construction λ -Closure (or Closure). It v- constructs the following function f of the type (αβ 1., β m). Let v(B 1/x 1.,B m/x m) be a valuation identical with v at least up to assigning objects B 1/β 1.

B m/β m to variables x 1.,x m. If Y is v(B 1/x 1.,B m/x m)-improper (see iii), then f is undefined at the tuple 〈B 1., B m〉. Otherwise, the value of fat 〈B 1.B m〉 is the α-entity v(B 1/x 1.,B m/x m)-constructed by Y.Nothing is a construction, unless it so follows from (i) through (iv).Empirical languages incorporate an element of contingency that the non-empirical ones lack. Empirical expressions denote empirical conditions that may or may not be satisfied at some world/time pair of evaluation. We model these empirical conditions as possible-world-semantic (PWS) intensions. PWS intensions are entities of type (βω): mappings from possible worlds to an arbitrary type β.

The type β is frequently the type of the chronology of α -objects, i.e., a mapping of type (ατ). Thus a-intensions are frequently functions of type ((ατ)ω), abbreviated as ' α τω '. Extensional entities are entities of a type α where α ≠ (βω) for any type β.Examples of frequently used intensions are propositions of type o τω, properties of individuals of type (οι) τω, binary relations-in-intension between individuals of type (οιι) τω, individual offices/roles of type ι τω.Where w ranges over ω and τ over, the following logical form essentially characterizes the logical syntax of empirical language:There are two additional constructions, Single and Double Execution, that we do not need in this paper. See, for instance, 4, 5.λ Wλ t.w.t.Logical objects like truth-functions and quantifiers are extensional: ∧ (conjunction), ∨ (disjunction), and ⊃ (implication) are of type (ooo), and ¬ (negation) of type (oo). Quantifiers ∀ α, ∃ α are type-theoretically polymorphous total functions of type (o(oα)), for an arbitrary type α, defined as follows. The universal quantifier ∀ α is a function that associates a class A of α -elements with T if A contains all elements of the type a, otherwise with F. The existential quantifier ∃ α is a function that associates a class A of a-elements with T if A is a non-empty class, otherwise with F.Below, all type indications will be provided outside the formulae in order not to clutter the notation.

Furthermore, 'X/ α' means that an object X is (a member) of type α. 'X → v α' means that X is typed to v-construct an object (if any) of type α. We write 'X → v α' if what is v-constructed does not depend on a valuation v. Throughout, it holds that the variables w → v ω co and t → v τ x.

If C → v α τω then the frequently used Composition C w f, which is the intensional descent (a.k.a. Extensionalization) of the α -intension v-constructed by C, will be encoded as 'C wt'. 5 ConclusionIn this paper, we dealt with the analysis of empirical questions that come attached with a presupposition. Our main novel results are these.

First, we provided a more accurate definition of presupposition of an empirical question. To this end, we adjusted the common definition by inference from possible answers, because we had to meet the problem of the ambiguity connected with negative answers. Thus, we distinguished between 'wide-scope' and 'narrow-scope' negation, and proposed that instead of the ambiguous answer applying the wide-scope negation, the adequate answer is the piece of information that the presupposition is not true, which is another contribution of this paper. Finally, we dealt with five presupposition triggers and provided their logical analysis in Transparent Intensional Logic.Our results are applicable not only in linguistics but also in the area of artificial intelligence, in particular, for the design of multi-agent systems. In such a system we need to formalize the content of messages in a fine-grained way so that agents' behavior is 'intelligent' and the system is not prone to inconsistencies due to a limited expressive power of the background logical system.

AcknowledgementsThis research has been supported by the grant agency of the Czech Republic, project No. 15-13277S, 'Hyperintensional Logic for Natural Language Analysis', by the internal agency of VSB-Technical University Ostrava, project No.

SP2015/85 'Knowledge Modeling and Its Applications in Software Engineering', and by the project co-financed by the European Social Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic No. 'The Enhancement of Creation of Excellent Research Teams and Intersectoral Mobility at Palacky University in Olomouc (POST-UP)'.