Review on "Obligatory Presupposition in Discourse"

8/6/2019 Review on "Obligatory Presupposition in Discourse"

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Obligatory Presupposition in Discourse : A Review

Pascal Amsili& Claire Beyssade

Universit Paris Diderot & Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle,CNRS Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS Paris.

Reviewed by : Arko Chakraborty, Research student, Dept. of Linguistics,

University of Calcutta, India.

[scheduled assignment under the PhD coursework: June, 2011]

The review of this article would start off with a brief introduction on the twin concepts of

Presupposition and Discourse/text Analysis in Section 1, which is to be followed by a critical

appreciation of the content and arguments as presented in the article in Section 2 and the last section

would deal with the possibilities of application of the same on the structure of Bangla/ Bengali

language.

1.Presupposition and DiscourseA presupposition, as a common concept given by several scholars, is a pragmatic inference

drawn from the proposition of a statement. This inference is in itself a distinct proposition but it is, in

most cases, not the prime focused proposition, rather the original statement asserts (or negates) with

a prime focus some other proposition B for the validity of which the presupposed proposition A is a

necessary pre-condition. In terms of truth-conditionality, the presupposition of a statement must

always be true irrespective of whether the statement is true.

Scholars like Karttunen, Frege, Strawson, and many others studied and found that such

presuppositions are possible when certain particular linguistic elements belonging to various

categories like verbs, proper nouns, adjectives of comparison, etc. are present in the structure of the

statement under consideration. These linguistic elements are usually morphological and sometimes

even syntactic and/or prosodic in nature and these were called by such scholars as presuppositional

triggers. Hence, these markers generate presuppositions.

On the other hand, while studying the structural and semantic relations both intra- and inter-sententially we come across several discourse markers, or to be more specific the so-called cohesive

markers, which define and link up the abovesaid relations in a text or spoken discourse. Often it is

found that some discourse markers happen to be presuppositional triggers too and perform their

characteristic functions independently but simultaneously.

The article here deals with some such linguistic elements which have both a presuppositional

and a discourse function.


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2.Critical appreciation of the articleThe article deals with the additive or emphatic particles/ morphemes like too and its

classmates like still, also, again, anymore, indeedquoting some examples from Zeevat (2002,2003)

and adding some of their own pertaining to the French language. Amsili & Beyssade, in this article,

in keeping with the observations of Green (1968) and Kaplan (1984), justify the presence and/or use

of such additive particles that do not apparently seem to add any further content/ information and

thereby seem to create redundancy. However, this redundancy is maintained as a price for the

presuppositional behavior of such additive particles most or all of which also act as anaphoric

cohesive markers.

Usually the second clause of a sentence (or the later part of a paragraph in a longer text)

contains an additive particle that holds a contrastive relation to some other element mentioned

earlier. Thus, following Kaplan, one of the major obligations for the use of particles like too is to

uphold the similarity between two contrastive topics. In quite a similar tune, Krifka (1999) upholdsthe utility of prosodic stress accent on the additive particle (giving examples from German and

English) and also upholds the function of differentiation and contrast as a major reason for the

obligatory presence of additive particles like too. Sb (2004) puts several objections to Krifkas

proposals but Amsili & Beyssade uphold the validity of the propositions of all the abovesaid

scholars.

Zeevat (2002) however shifts his emphasis from the importance of the presuppositional

function to the discourse function saying that the latter is more crucial for the obligatory presence of

such additive particles. Amsili & Beyssade strive towards classifying and grouping together a set of

presuppositional triggers and non-presuppositional discourse markers on the basis of three

parameters:

(i) obligatoriness, (ii) minimal meaning with no further lexical content added, and (iii) that they

give rise to an accessibility anomaly. By accessibility Amsili & Beyssade mean the access or

anaphoric co-reference of such a particle/ marker to its antecedent.

Amsili & Beyssade include the following in their class of triggers (from French), however,

the exemplary statements that they provide to substantiate the argument do not necessarily abide by

all the above three properties:

Pure additive items aussi (also), ne...plus (not anymore).

Aspectual items re-, encore (still), de nouveau (again), ne...plus (not anymore).

Cleft and intonation

Some factive verbs savoir (to know)+ que/si, ignorer (not to know)+ que/si, vrifier +que/si,

realize, be aware.

In the third section of the article Amsili & Beyssade explain their argument in terms of

conversational and scalar implicatures following Gricean notions as well as the theories of Hawkins

(1978) and Heim (1991). So far as the conversational implicatures are concerned, Amsili &

Beyssade, in line with Krifka, state that assertion of the condition or state of affairs of some entity x

implicates that no other entity shares the same set of conditions or state of affairs which belongsolely to x and thus now if any other entity y is stated to share the same then it leads to an anomaly


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or contradiction whereby the existing implicatures gets nullified upon further information as in the

example below. Then to maintain the truthfulness and validity of the assertions regarding both the

entities x & y such additive particles like too are required.

A: What did Peter and Pia eat?_________ (Peter =x and Pia = y)B: Peter ate pasta. _____________________ (implicates Pia didnt eat pasta)

C: Peter ate pasta, and Pia ate pasta________ (contradicts with B)

Solution: i) C: Peter ate pasta, and Pia ate pasta too.______(saves all implicatures)

ii) C: Peter and Pia ate pasta._________( Grices maxim of manner followed)

This explanation is followed by the comparison with scalar implicatures whereby a statement s

without an additive particle/trigger is placed higher on the scale than another statement having the

additive particle s+too in the order < s, s+too > which they call a scalar alternative; however the

incomplete explanation of this point lacks justification and is controversial, since the criterion ofsuch classification is the maximum number of presuppositions which a statement (with and without

additive particles) can generate. Surely, s+too can give rise to more presuppositions, yet it is placed

lower on the scale.

In the fourth and final section of the article Amsili & Beyssade talk of the connection

between the obligatoriness of such additive particles or presuppositional triggers on one hand and

discourse relations (in a text) on the other hand.

Their argument is that if the cohesion of structure and coherence of meaning (jointly called the

discourse relation) between successive parts of a text is already clear prior to the use of such a

particle/ trigger, then the use of the trigger becomes optional but is never forbidden. The following

example (showing wider discourse context) quoted from the article explains this.

(1)Jean est malade, Marie est malade, Paul est malade, tout le monde est malade alors!John is sick, Marie is sick, Paul is sick, everybody is sick then!

The above example does not have such particles or triggers because through a system of

enumerationor counting a discourse relation becomes evident in the entire text which shows that

the presuppositions of the individual parts implicate each time that no one else is sick but when we

reach the end of the text we find that multiple counting leads to the fact that every single person as

well as every other person is sick. This is actually a case of projection problem and defeasibility of

presuppositions in wider discourse contexts which Amsili & Beyssade do not refer to here. As an

alternative, they say that the same statement above can be equally well-formed if the

particles/triggers are used, as follows:

(2)Jean est malade, Marie aussi, Paul aussi, tout le monde est malade alors!John is sick, Marie too, Paul too, everybody is sick then!


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Also what they didnt point out in their article is that the word sick itself acts as a cohesive

marker (contextually) since it prevails as an unchanged predicate or state of affairs for each

individual. If different predicates were used then the additive particle too cannot be used, e.g.

(3)John is sick. Mary is happy. Paul is unconscious.

This sentence (3) cannot be replaced with an alternative statement using too, at the same time one

cannot say that there exists no semantic relation or coherence between each clause/simplex sentence.

Momentarily it might be assumed and in a still wider context as given below the discourse relations

might become more obvious. Thus we can assume (4) from (3) by inserting the omitted/ elided

cohesive markers.

(4)John is sick,so Mary is happy,but Paul is unconscious.Even without using the above discourse markers we can deduce the same coherent relations very

easily from a wider context.

(5)Mary always keeps John in her bad books. John hasntbeen to office for several days. He issick. Johns little brother, Paul, went to report this at the office. Mary is happy. She clapped

her hands and told Paul to tell John that he is fired. Paul is unconscious as John was the only

earning member in their family.

The point here is that whether a discourse relation is present in a small or large text due to the

presence of overt cohesive markers or due to the sequence of events (abiding by the Gricean notionofmaxim of manner), the additive particles or presuppositional triggers like too, still, again, etc. do

not have a discrete optionality of occurrence. So, it goes against the proposition of Amsili &

Beyssade that such particles or triggers remain optional and are not barred from occurring, rather as

we see in the examples (3,4 and 5) above, such triggers can be barred.

This argument can be extended to one more step when we find that instead of using identical or

totally different predicates, if synonymous or hyponymous predicates are used then the predicates of

the successive clauses can be replaced with too, as in (6) and (7) below. Even this was not

considered in the article of Amsili & Beyssade.

(6a) John is sick, Marie is down with fever, Paul has a backache, everybody is sick then!

(6b) John is sick, Marietoo, Paultoo, everybody is sick then! ____________ (hyponymy)

(7a) John is joyous, Marie is merry, Paul is cheerful, everybody is happy then!

(7b) John is joyous, Marietoo, Paultoo, everybody is happy then! ____ (near-synonymy)

Lastly, they conclude the article saying that the presence of one such marker/trigger pre-empts but

does not bar the necessity or obligatoriness of the presence of parallel or co-functional triggers.


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3.The perspective of Bengali (a brief outline)Although Bengali has its own conjunctions or additive discourse markers pertaining to English

and = [ar ~ ebo], these sometimes do and sometimes do not function like presuppositional triggers,

as distinguished in (8) and (9) below:

(8) John khelche ar Peter mai kache

John (is) playing and Peter soil digging____ use of [ar] as additive cohesive marker

(9) John okhane ar jabe na

John there again go not____________ [ar] is a presuppositional trigger here.

Thus in a statement like (9) the additive discourse marker acts as a presuppositional trigger and

presupposes that John had gone there earlier.

However, Bengali has an emphatic inclusive particle {-o} which is suffixed to any base

morpheme irrespective of the grammatical category of the base. This particle is both an additive

discourse marker as well as a presuppositional trigger and it performs both these functions

simultaneously as shown below in (10).

(10) A: ami skule jabo na

I to school will go not.

B: ami-o

I-too ( = Me too in colloquial English).

C: ami-o jabo na

I-too will go not

This {-o} not only functions as an additive marker thereby adding upon or including the latter

speaker B to the same state of affairs, but also performs the optional cohesive function of substitution

whereby the construction [skule jabo na] is not repeated but elided and replaced or substituted by theparticle or bound suffix {-o} in B and partially substituted in C. However, [ami], the first personal

pronoun, being the focal element in each statement cannot be deleted and it is the focal element only

that takes the additive marker.

Now, looking at B or C, whenever a native speaker of Bengali would find the presence of such an

additive marker like {-o} s/he would presume or presuppose that apart from the current speaker who

addresses himself/herself as [ami + o] there is some other participant who is equally involved in the

concerned action or state of affairs. Thus this presupposition of the involvement of at least another

participant is triggered by the presence of the bound suffix {-o}.

Documents

Review on "Obligatory Presupposition in Discourse"