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(Accepted for presentation at the IPrA2023)
Typed Selectional Restrictions as Natural Language Ontology:
Presupposition Projection and Copredication
Selectional restrictions are limitations on the applicability of predicates to arguments. Those
sensitive to ‘the type of entity selected for’ I dub Typed Selectional Restrictions. To
illustrate, consider:
(1) The blood of that person is blue.
(2) ? The ambition of that person is blue.
One interprets (1) as implausible and false but (2) ‘not even false’ since ambition cannot be
coloured.
A presuppositional treatment is widely preferred (Horn 1990, Beaver 2001) over a syntactic
account (Chomsky 1965). More controversial is their nature (semantic vs. pragmatic) and
source (lexical specification, linguistic composition vs. world knowledge).
Independently, the Presupposition Projection Problem has been extensively studied
(Karttunen & Peters 1979; Soames 1982). Presupposition projection in conjoined complex
sentences shows a distinct pattern. Certain connectives are ‘filters’, allowing projection
exclusively on certain occasions. Experiments exploring presupposition projection from
conjunction and disjunction confirm principled symmetric behaviour for ‘and’ but
asymmetric behaviour for ‘or’ (Kalomoiros & Schwarz 2022). To illustrate, Contrast (3) and
(4), where ‘quit VPing’ presupposes ‘used to VP’ and ‘#’ indicates infelicity in the out-of-blue
context.
(3) a. John used to smoke and quit smoking.
b. # John quitted smoking and used to smoke.
(4) a. Either John has never smoked, or he quit smoking.
b. Either John quitted smoking, or he has never smoked.
The two-way interaction is further complicated by polysemy of the subject nominal in ‘co-
predication’ constructions, when one polysemous nominal has simultaneous predications
selecting for two different senses (Ortega-Andrés and Vicente 2019).
(5) a. The city has 500,000 inhabitants and outlawed smoking in bars last year.
b. # The city outlawed smoking in bars last year and has 500,000 inhabitants.
An account that treats such selectional restrictions as lexically specified, semantically typed
presuppositions (Asher 2011) which place stringent formal requirements has difficulty
accounting for the contrast in (5). Pragmatic factors, factoring in worldly knowledge about
the ontological dependency relations between territories and political representations as
concepts, seem to be at play.
(Accepted for presentation at the IPrA2023)
Moreover, the choice of connective manipulates sentence acceptability in identical ways. To
illustrate, observe how the contrast between (5) and (6) parallels that between (3) and (4).
(6) a. Either the city has 500,000 inhabitants or outlawed smoking in bars last year.
b. Either the city outlawed smoking in bars last year or it has 500,000 inhabitants.
A presupposition projection algorithm, independently motivated to explain (3) and (4), can
thus be naturally extended to account for felicity data like (5) and (6). The observed similar
patterns strongly argue for a pragmatic treatment of selectional restrictions especially since
a refined pragmatic account of presupposition projection, empirically supported recently,
has been developed (Schlenker 2009).
We argue that selectional restrictions are pragmatic presuppositions of a special type that
arise during composition. Furthermore, they are constrained by ‘natural language
metaphysics’ (Bach 1986), a level of cognitive representation intermediate between
linguistic and world knowledge.
Our approach better accounts for selectional restrictions’ weakly typed, coarse-grained,
constraint-like behaviour and sensitivity to linear order. This work has implications for
semantics-pragmatics distinction, linguistic-conceptual interface and compositionality.
References
Bach, E. (1986). Natural language metaphysics. In R. Barcan Marcus, G.J.W. Dorn & P. Weingartner
(Eds.). Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science Vol VII. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 573–595.
Beaver, D. (2001). Presupposition and assertion in dynamic semantics. Stanford: CSLI publications.
Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Horn, L. (1990). Showdown at truth-value gap: Burton-roberts on presupposition. Journal of
Linguistics 26, 483–503.
Kalomoiros, A., & Schwarz, F. (2022). Presupposition projection from 'or' vs. 'and' –an experimental
comparison. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung (Vol. 26, pp. 503-521).
Karttunen, L., & Peters, S. (1979). Conventional Implicature.In C.-K. Oh, & D.A. Dinneen (Eds.),
Presupposition (pp. 1–56). New York: Academic Press.
Ortega-Andrés, M., & Vicente, A. (2019). Polysemy and co-predication. Glossa: a journal of general
linguistics, 4(1).
Schlenker, P. (2009). Local contexts. Semantics and Pragmatics, 2, 3-1.
Soames, S. (1982). How presuppositions are inherited: A solution to the projection
problem. Linguistic Inquiry, 13(3), 483-545.
