Below, please find Homework #2. This is an optional assignment, and is not required for class credit. The exercise touches on issues we will raise next Monday, so (if you decide to do it) please send your answers to singhr@mit.edu by Sunday, 17 July. Our answer will be posted on the website the following Monday.
Again, feel free to come to either one of us with questions in the meantime.
We will see cases where an assertion A that requires the common ground to be a certain way can be felicitously uttered even when the common ground does not satisfy A’s presuppositional requirements. For example, imagine Kai rushes into class ten minutes late on Wednesday, and utters:
(1) Kai: I’m sorry I’m late. I had to take my daughter to the day care centre.
Kai’s assertion has a presupposition, viz., that Kai has a daughter. Not many of you know or believe (or even have an opinion about) this proposition. Hence, it cannot be common ground, and surely Kai is aware of that.
Nonetheless, few of us have difficulty with it. We “accommodate” the proposition fine enough, that is, we adjust our beliefs to include the proposition that Kai has a daughter, without complaint.
There are at least two factors that could be expected to influence how easy it is to accommodate a proposition presupposed by a speaker’s utterance. (i) The ease of accommodation might depend on how much trust the hearers have in the speaker’s information state about the relevant issue. (ii) The ease of accommodation might also depend on how well the proposition fits into the hearers’ belief systems.
Compare in this light (1) with the following:
(2) Kai: I’m sorry I’m late. I had to take my llama to the vet.
Now, consider a couple more sentences:
(3) Kai: I just found out that it was Anju who broke the typewriter.
(4) Kai: Guess what. Thony is going to Sweden, too.
Exercise:
- What are the presuppositions of (3) and (4)?
- Imagine these sentences being uttered in contexts where the presuppositions are NOT satisfied. How easy is it to accommodate the presuppositions of (3) and (4) in such contexts?
- Can you propose an explanation for the difference in ease of accommodation, if any, between (1) on the one hand and (3)/(4) on the other hand?