<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W06-1310">
  <Title>Semantic and Pragmatic Presupposition in Discourse Representation Theory</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="68" end_page="69" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Semantic and Pragmatic
Presupposition
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The literature has mostly considered the hearer's side of receiving the presupposition when dealing with agent presupposition (pragmatics) as opposed to sentence presupposition (semantics). For instance, van der Sandt (1992) deals with accommodation from the hearer's perspective, not distinguishing between speaker and hearer presupposition. However, the relationship between sentence presupposition and agent presupposition can be explained by dividing agent presupposition into speaker presupposition and hearer presupposition.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> From the speaker's point of view, speakers make utterances to communicate new information. Generally speaking, to generate a communicatively meaningful utterance, there would be some discrepancy between the speaker's beliefs and the speaker's beliefs about the hearer's beliefs. The discrepancy leads to an assertion, A, which may need presupposed arguments to be understood. First, the speaker decides on the assertion after checking belief discrepancies. Then, the speaker finds the right presuppositions to be able to communicate the assertion.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Hearer presupposition differs in that utterances are split into presupposition and assertion, where possible, and presuppositions are first needed to establish links to objects in order for the new information to be understood by the hearer. For a hearer, assertions build on presupposition and the procedure is bottom-up (assertion is supported by presupposition).2 Therefore, in line with linking the speaker's beliefs with the linguistic utterance and the linguistic utterance with the hearer's beliefs, the speaker's presupposition is conveyed through the speaker's utterance (sentence presupposition), and the speaker's utterance leads to the hearer's presupposition. This interaction between the semantic and pragmatic notions of presupposition is a more balanced conception of presupposition (cf.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Figure 1).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> With regard to the A part of an utterance received by the hearer, the hearer can first 'accept', or 'weakly believe', the new information and later on turn that weak belief into a belief, by adding it to her belief set (Al-Raheb 2005). However, it is worth mentioning that when making an utterance, both the speaker and the hearer focus their attention on A, which can get accepted by the hearer. In such a case, the hearer may later adopt A as a belief and indicate so to the speaker, making A a mutual belief, which may or may not serve as a presupposition afterwards in the dialogue. It is possible for P to be a mutual belief that both agents in the conversation mutually know they hold, or a  new piece of information packaged as P. From this discussion, it can be seen that beliefs impose some constraints on making an utterance. The following section distinguishes between agent presupposition (speaker presupposition and hearer presupposition) and links agents presupposition to sentence presupposition.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>