Redundancy and presuppositional exhaustification

Abstract

Recent work has argued that different inferences, such as homogeneity and implicatures, are in fact presuppositions, based on similarities in their pragmatic status and their projection properties (Fox, 2018; Bassi et al., 2021 a.o.). Nevertheless, these inferences seem to differ from presuppositions in some ways: (i) as evidenced by the Hey, wait a minute! test, homogeneity and implicatures don’t interact with the common ground in the same way as presuppositions (Spector, 2013; Bassi et al., 2021) and (ii) homogeneity and implicatures project differently from presuppositions in some environments, like the scope of certain quantifiers (Spector, 2013; Križ, 2015; Chatain and Schlenker, 2023). In this paper, I argue that under the view that homogeneity and implicatures are due to the presuppositional exhaustification operator pex, (i) follows from an independently needed redundancy constraint which requires that presuppositions due to pex have to be canceled with the A operator. I then show that on a modular view of presupposition projection, this result can be exploited to account for at least some of the differences in projection.