Speaker: Athulya Aravind

Abstract: Natural language affords us the means to communicate not only new information, but also information that we are already taking for granted, our presuppositions. The proper characterization of presuppositions–the way they enter into the compositional semantics and the way they fit into the exchange of information in communicative situations–has been at the center of long-standing debate. One class of theories treat presuppositions as categorically imposing restrictions on the conversational common ground: presuppositions must signal information that is already mutually known by all conversation participants. While principled and elegant, these theories are often empirically inadequate, as the common ground requirement is not always met in everyday conversation. A second class of theories, therefore, adopt weaker and less categorical approaches to the phenomenon that are a better fit to the empirical facts. In this talk, I present arguments from child language for the categorical treatment of presuppositions advocated by the common ground theories. Children initially adopt a view of presuppositions as uniformly placing restrictions on the conversational common ground, even in situations where these requirements may be bent. More tellingly, children initially lack the ability to use presuppositions in ways that violate the common ground requirement. The developmental patterns thus vindicate the theoretical idealizations whose empirical validity is often masked in part due to the pragmatic sophistication of adult language users.