CAPÍTULO 9. DISCUSIÓN Y CONCLUSIONES
9.5. P ALABRAS DE C IERRE
3.1.3. Deberes escolares
As mentioned previously, due to their projective behaviour expressives look a lot like presuppositions, which made a lot of authors support the idea that they are indeed a kind of presupposition (Macià 2002, 2006, Sauerland 2007, Lasersohn 2007, Schlenker 2003, 2007). The most concrete proposal from the presuppositional field comes from Schlenker (2007) and is presented below.
4.2.1. Expressives as indexical presuppositions: Schlenker (2007)
In a brief commentary to Potts (2007), Schlenker (2007) offers an elaborate sketch of how expressives could be accounted for in the existing ontology of meaning as ‘expressive presuppositions’. The gist of the proposal is that ‘expressives are lexical
89 items that carry a presupposition of a particular sort, namely one which is indexical (it is evaluated with respect to a context)79, attitudinal (it predicates something of the mental state of the agent of that context), and sometimes shiftable (the context of evaluation need not be the context of the actual utterance).’ (2007: 237). Based on these assumptions, the expressive presuppositions of the racial slur ‘honky’ and the French familiar pronoun ‘tu’ are represented as follows:
(148) ⟦honky⟧(c)(w)≠ # iff80 the agent of c believes in the world of c that white people are despicable. If ≠ #, ⟦honky⟧(c)(w) = ⟦white⟧(c)(w)
(149) ⟦tu⟧(c)(w)≠ # iff the agent of c believes in the world of c that he stands in a familiar relation to the addressee of c. If ≠ #, ⟦tu⟧(c)(w) = the addressee of c
Schlenker’s (2007) claim is that the distinctive characteristics of expressive meaning as proposed by Potts (2007) follow naturally from the properties of indexicality and attitudinality advocated by his approach. First, independence follows from presuppositionhood, as it is a fact for all presuppositions that are separate from regular at-issue meaning. Next, nondisplaceability directly follows from indexicality, while perspective dependence can be derived by an account of shifted indexicality, which is not ad hoc but has been independently motivated to account for the cross-linguistic variation of indexicals (Schlenker 2003). Then, immediacy follows from the combination of indexicality and attitudinality, which are responsible for the performative character of expressives and render them ‘self-fulfulling presuppositions’, as will be explained below. The properties of descriptive ineffability and repeatability are not accounted for, but Schlenker raises reasonable doubts on their validity. With regards to descriptive ineffability, he notes that it could be due to the mismatch between presupposition and assertion, but also alludes to Geurts (2007), who notes that descriptive ineffability is a property of many lexical items, such as colour terms. As for repeatability, he notes that when an expressive is used repeatedly (e.g. ‘I left my damn keys in my damn car’, Potts 2007), it modifies a different constituent each time, hence the lack of redundancy. Elaborating on the notion of self-fulfilling presuppositions, Schlenker (2007) observes that this could account for the anti-backgrounding character of expressives, which is significantly different from standard presuppositions. First, he reminds us that informative presuppositions are a phenomenon that has already been noticed independently from expressive meaning (Stalnaker 2002, von Fintel 2006). To show how this works, let’s assume that in the context of each one of the examples below, there is only one president who has the characteristic mentioned (examples from Schlenker 2007: 240):
(150) #The brown-haired/tall president will take us out of this quagmire. (151) The stupid/fantastic president will take us out of this quagmire.
79 It should be noted that indexicality was proposed as a means to account for expressive
meaning also by Sauerland (2007), Lasersohn (2007) as well as Amaral, Roberts and Smith (2008).
80 Note that the use of ‘iff’ here is not problematic as it was for Gutzmann’s (2015) schema as
explained above, exactly because Schlenker’s (2007) representation is merely presuppositional so still within the realm of truth conditions, whereas Gutzmann’s (2015) was advocated as use- conditional.
90 Based on what we know about presuppositions, the definite descriptions (which include adjectives) trigger the presupposition that there exists exactly one individual who has that characteristic. But (150) is infelicitous because we already know that there is only a single individual who is a president and brown-haired/tall, which means that the adjectives are not doing any semantic work, flouting thus the Gricean principle of manner. However (151) is acceptable, because the adjectives do have a semantic mission: to provide information on the speaker’s attitude towards the president. This is precisely an instance of an informative presupposition.
Schlenker observes that there are two ways of explaining why expressives should be analysed as informative presuppositions. One explanation would be that accommodation (Lewis 1979) is easy with presuppositions about the speaker’s attitudes, given that a one has authority over one’s mental states. But since accommodation is usually seen as a repair strategy and one might wish to avoid any idea of repair, another explanation is one based on Stalnaker’s (2002) proposal that if it is common belief that the speaker believes that something is common belief, and if the interlocutors also believe that same thing, then it becomes common belief indeed. In the discussion about presuppositions which express attitudes, if the speaker believes that s/he has the attitude conveyed by the expressive and also that the interlocutors know that s/he does, as soon as the addressee hears the speaker utter the expressive presupposition s/he will come to believe it as it predicates something of the speaker’s mental states (by being indexical and attitudinal) and the addressee has no reason or means to contest it, even though it was not previously in the common ground. In this way, expressive presuppositions are systematically informative, but also ‘self-fulfilling’, in the sense that mere signalling from the speaker that s/he believes to be harbouring the attitude encoded by the expressive presupposition (and that the interlocutors also believe it) suffices for its acceptance in the common ground.
Summarising, Schlenker (2007) provides convincing evidence that expressives constitute a kind of presupposition that is indexical and attitudinal. This move is theoretically parsimonious in that no new category of meaning is introduced, while the introduction of a subcategory of presuppositions which are indexical is not radical and is perhaps even expected given that we know that there is at-issue meaning which is indexical and there are no theoretical reasons to preclude indexicality at the presuppositional dimension (Sauerland 2007). Overall, the presuppositional analysis of expressives seems theoretically appealing as well as convincing, however Schlenker (2016) himself mentions the following caveats. First, there is a considerable difference of pragmatic effect between ordinary and so-called expressive presuppositions (2016: 726):
(152) Everybody knows that I hate Caucasians. Are you one? (153) Are you a honky?
As it should be evident to the reader, even though both examples carry the presupposition that the speaker is prejudiced against Caucasians, the level of offence of (153) is much greater. The second significant difference is that unlike ordinary
91 presuppositions, expressives display a more unconstrained projective behaviour, which can be seen in filtering environments (Schlenker 2016: 726):
(154) Nobody stole my car, or it was John who did.
(155) I am not prejudiced against Caucasians, or you are the worst honky I know.
As the above examples show, the presupposition of (154) is filtered out and thus does not project, while it strongly feels that the expressive presupposition of (155) projects out. This seems like a significant difference between run-of-the-mill presuppositions and expressives, but as Schlenker (2016) notes, a plausible explanation could be the triggering of ignorance implicatures, as it is rather odd for the speaker to display ignorance of his/her own mental state. I will elaborate on this immediately below.
4.2.2. Objections against the presuppositional analysis
The task of scrutinising the claim that expressives are presuppositions is undertaken by Thommen (2017), who carefully cross-examins them side to side with ordinary presuppositions. He finds that even when controlling for the possible confounds of ignorance implicatures and intensionality, expressives do project more robustly than ordinary presuppositions, which strongly suggests that they are not a kind of presupposition.
As mentioned right above, a possible reason why expressives project out of disjunction filters could be the triggering of ignorance implicatures. Thommen (2017) proposes that in order to circumvent this confound, one could try subjunctive conditional filters instead, as follows (2017: 189-90):
(156) If France was a monarchy, the monarch of France would be bald.
(157) If I were Germanophobic, then my colleagues would be Germanophobic too. (158) ! If I were Germanophobic, then John would be a boche.
While the construction is the same in all examples, we see projection only in (158), where the slur boche is used. But as Thommen notes, this is explained by the indexical character of expressive presuppositions, as they were proposed by Schlenker (2007). Specifically, because of indexicality, the consequent of the conditional is tied to the actual world rather than any epistemically accessible worlds introduced by the modal operator, which accounts for the projective behaviour:
(159) ∀w ∈ R(w*) ((⟦I am Germanophobic⟧(c)(w) = 1) → (the speaker of c is Germanophobic in w))
(160) ∀w ∈ R(w*) ((⟦I am Germanophobic⟧(c)(w) =1) → (the speaker of c is Germanophobic in w*))
Based on the above, Thommen (2017) contends that a legitimate comparison between ordinary presuppositions and expressives ought to control for both confounds of
92 ignorance implicatures as well as intensionality. To this end, Thommen (2017) introduces a game show where players deliberately try to give as little information as possible for other players to guess their identity, which means that no ignorance implicatures should arise in disjunctive constructions. And because disjunctive constructions are extensional, the confound of intensionality does not arise either. Thommen provides the following examples (2017: 193):
(161) Either I don’t hate Caucasians, or I hate Caucasians and my daughter married a Caucasian.
(162) ! Either I don’t hate Caucasians, or my daughter married a honky.
Evidently, there is a difference in the projective behaviour between (161) and (162), with the former providing no clues or commitments about the speaker’s ethnic prejudices, and the latter conveying a certain level of offence. Because this environment controls for both previously suspected confounds, Thommen (2017) concludes that the contrast between (161) and (162) testifies against the idea that expressives are a kind of presupposition.