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Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 8.
1 (2012): 37-59
DOI: 10.1515/lpp-2012-0004

Louis de Saussure
University of Neuchtel

COGNITIVE PRAGMATIC WAYS INTO
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS:
THE CASE OF DISCURSIVE PRESUPPOSITIONS

Abstract
This paper aims at showing how pragmatics, today a discipline developing
in close connection with cognitive science and evolutionary psychology,
provides new ways to envisage Discourse Analysis. In this article, we first
discuss the relationship between pragmatics and Discourse Analysis,
focusing on the links between the process of utterance understanding, which
is in the scope of pragmatic theories, and consenting to beliefs (influence),
which is in the scope of Discourse Analysis (Section 2). Next (Section 3),
we introduce an extended notion of presuppositions which we name
discursive presuppositions, which are unexpressed contents but
nonetheless propositions that need to be incorporated in the background and
thus consented to in order to provide not meaning proper but relevance to
the utterance. Last section (Section 4) is dedicated to the examination of
two examples where discursive presuppositions are exploited in
persuasiveness.

Keywords
Discourse Analysis, pragmatics, utterance understanding, persuasion,
discursive presuppositions, presupposition accommodation

1. Introduction

This paper explores how some pragmatic notions, thus which directly concern
the process of human natural language understanding, may help explain facts that
are central to the worries of Discourse Analysis, such as persuasion, ideologies,
manipulation, and similar effects of verbal communication. The notion we focus on
in this paper is that of presupposition; presuppositions are traditionally considered
not only semantic but also pragmatic, in particular because they can be mobilized
to bridge semantic gaps, so to say, for example in order to achieve anaphora
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38
Louis de Saussure
Cognitive Pragmatic Ways into Discourse Analysis:
The Case of Discursive Presuppositions

resolution. But such presuppositions, although the literature usually take them to be
part of what is assumed already known by the interlocutors, still concern a notion
of meaning. Our proposal (see also de Saussure forthcoming) is to extend the
paradigm of presuppositions to those contents brought about by an utterance as
pre-conditions not to meaning but to relevance; we name such presuppositions
discursive presuppositions.
After briefly discussing why notions relative to understanding have an impact
on the analysis of discourses, we develop the notion of discursive presuppositions
and exemplify their impact on discourses through two short case studies.
Pragmatics, being the science of language in use, has developed into a great
number of areas of research, but which can be roughly delimitated in two great
categories of approaches. A first trend imposes a breakpoint with former
approaches of meaning, that is, truth-conditional semantics, and considers
language use within aspects of social psychology. It is focused on what a speaker
does when performing an utterance. This trend of research anchors on a particular
developmentofthe generalized version of speech act theory by John L. Austin.
A second trend, and thus a second way to understand the term pragmatics,
concerns the study of what a hearer does when interpreting an utterance. This
trend of research focuses not on the performance of actions in the social world but
rather on the grasping of meanings, of many kinds thus not, or not only, truth-
conditional meaning. Such approaches, basically, anchor mostly on the work of
Paul H. Grice. Obviously, there are many disagreements within scholars attached
to various conceptions of what meaning is, what relations it has or does not have
with reference and what meanings are relatively to context. But despite these
disagreements, there are a number of fundamental aspects on which scholars and
theories of meaning agree (if meaning is taken not as an abstract fact of
disincarnated language but as an online construct). Those theories of meaning
that do study language understanding, and thus linguistic communication as an
empirical fact, are not only semantic but pragmatic theories: they do wonder about
how we proceed to understand the meanings conveyed by a speaker with an
utterance, and thus they are concerned with the natural processes that take place in
cognition, which leads a hearer to modify his mental state when confronted to an
intentional linguistic stimulus. Hence, pragmatic theories in this sense have to be
cognitive theories of the processing of utterances, and, as a matter of consequence,
theories of human communication in general, thus not only linguistic, and, one
may add, general theories of human information processing. Interestingly, these
theories do also aim at explaining specific linguistic and even lower-level
grammatical empirical facts: the principles they posit lead to predictions on the
very effect of linguistic structures, not only on the broader domain of implicatures.
Very linguistic and semantic empirical facts, such as anaphora resolution, tense
and aspect modulation, conceptual accommodation, modality, evidentiality,
39
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 8.1 (2012): 37-59
DOI: 10.1515/lpp-2012-0004

presupposition, the meaning of grammatical expressions, etc., all call for some
import from pragmatics, hence the still crucial focus of scholars on the interface of
pragmatics with semantics and grammar.
Pragmatic theories are not only generally in agreement on the natural
grounding of language processing in cognition (although they differ in the weight
they grant to convention in both lexical meaning and interpretive principles), they
also virtually all agree on the fact that the overall principles managing language
understanding are about the economy of information processing, involving what
Reboul (in press) calls minmax scales, that is, types of rules where costs should
be minimized while effects should be maximized (see Reboul in press for
a development). While some theories (Horn 2004; Levinson 2000) posit
a conventional reassessment of Gricean maxims, others (Sperber and Wilson 1986,
1995) suggest that the hearer follows automatic and spontaneous mechanical
cognitive principles dealing with a threshold of meaning to be obtained on the
basis of an effort-demanding utterance balanced with expectations of information.
Most approaches are driven by theory-of-mind abilities to recover meaning
intentions, whatever the version of the theory-of-mind posited. Whatever the
ultimate truth, there is at least a range of supporting experimental evidence for the
need to incorporate a mindreading module of some sort into the picture of natural
pragmatic understanding, together with a notion of equilibrium between costs and
benefits in the processing of information, an equilibrium Sperber and Wilson name
relevance. Another ensemble of cognitive pragmatic theories, labeled cognitive
linguistics, also share the assumption that our understanding of utterances
involves automatic (but partly conventional), mechanisms of information
processing, thus cognitive mechanisms. Such theories assume that the human
ability to bridge the gap between what is brought in communication by the code
and full meaning, further constructed with recourse to non-linguistic knowledge,
has to do with broader aspects of human interaction in communication: anticipating
reactions of others, guessing their thoughts and intentions, collaborating and/or
coordinating, sharing knowledge, etc., all aspects of social life developed together
with communication throughout evolution. Pragmatic theories may (Sperber and
Wilson 1995) or may not (Levinson) take a cognitive-innate version of syntax as
their basis, but when they do, they then also aim at bridging the gap between i) the
human ability to manipulate abstract forms (i.e. our syntactic competence) with
evidence suggesting that the format of natural language is constrained by universal
cognitive patterns (Newmeyer 2009), with ii) the exploitation of language in actual
communication, which relies on other, non- formal, principles, that is, heuristics.

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Louis de Saussure

2. Pragmatics and discourse analysis: a cognitive turn

Debates on how understanding works may seem somehow incidental when
considering the worries of (Critical) Discourse Analysis, which are not about how
utterances are understood but about how discourses are apt to maintain, strengthen
and propagate ideologies, that is, ensure, reinforce or manufacture consent to ideas.
First, adhering to ideas might well seem an entirely different matter than
understanding a verbal sequence. Understanding meanings does not seem to entail
incorporating these meanings as beliefs. Second, the processes involved in
understanding are automatic, non-conscious, spontaneous and not at all
controllable (one cannot choose not to understand an utterance) while the process
involved in changing ones mind or raising a new belief involves, at least may
involve, some reflexive operation, that is, conscious evaluation that the argument is
sound (whatever this exactly means). That way, incorporating a new belief is not
so much a matter of understanding something (which is then only a basic pre-
requisite, as is the grasping of the locutionary act for further illocutionary and
perlocutionary effects) but one of critically evaluating arguments as convincing.
Thus, if a theory has to be brought in the picture, it should rather be a theory of
(sound) argumentation within the logic of rhetoric (such as van Eemeren and
Grootendorst 1992) than a theory of mere language understanding. Fourth, it may
be argued that the way discourses are perceived is a matter of socio-historical
context, of relations of power, all things having to do with cultural contexts and
social psychology.
In fact, providing arguments that some discourse conveys some ideology, or
has a persuasive power, or is manipulative, etc., does not require a serious theory
of language understanding and even not, maybe, a theory of any sort at all in the
scientificsense ofanexplanation based on testable causal relations. After all, it
does not require a specific expertise in the scientific sense of it to provide
arguments showing some manipulative aspects, or rhetorical unfairness, in
discourses and conversational interactions. Any intelligent person taking the
necessary time and caution, or even occasionally on the fly, can identify such
suspicious processes. A recent example of this can be found when French President
Nicolas Sarkozy, accused by a journalist of having ordered illegal spying of
journalists (in the investigation of the so-called Bettencourt case, where there is
a suspicion of illegal funding of the presidential campaign in 2007 in favour of his
party), said: No journalist was spied on. Why spy on a journalist in order to
know what he has to say, which he will write in the paper the nextmorning?The
journalistthensaid,identifyingthediscursiveproblemonline:No,inordertofind
outhissources.Inthesameinterview,NicolasSarkozywentonandsaid,alluding
tothesocialistgovernmentofFranoisMitterrand:IrememberaRepublic where
a Greenpeace vessel was blown up, and a photographer died, because the secret
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serviceswereaskedtodothisjob.Again,thejournalistidentifiedthefallacyand
said: This is not an excuse for todays errors (Interview on France Inter radio,
April 17, 2012). The journalist is not a scientist trained in Discourse Analysis but
a skilled counter-manipulator however. A trained discourse analyst would do an
extensive analysis of such discursive events, but the import of a purely
discursive analysis of them will only describe in more details that there is an
issue of influence in the discourse. But it will not help us to increase our concrete
knowledge of how such attempts of persuading, if not appropriately countered in
the right moment, might have indeed a persuasive effect on the audience.
However, the arguments given above according to which a theory of
understanding does not help Discourse Analysis are not convincing. In fact,
understanding is crucially bound to accepting propositions as believable. This is
particularly visible when looking at issues like evidentiality (see Hart 2011, de
Saussure 2011, Oswald 2011) or, as we shall propose further down,
presuppositions. Second, that consenting has to do with reflexive intellectual
operations is questionable as a general statement: the way a proposition is judged
sound by a hearer involves a complex set of data and processes which are far
from being all conscious: intuition and automatic heuristics, as widely documented
in the literature, play a crucial role in what spontaneously looks acceptable or not.
Fourth, while it is clear that sociocultural factors intervene, it is also clear that
these factors are parameters entering chains of (at least mostly automatic)
evaluations. And let us add a further argument: if discourses convey ideologies in
fallacious ways, which they obviously do very often at least in some genres like
political discourse, and that these fallacies do work somehow, then the human
mind does not follow pure logical paths in interpreting and consenting to
a discourse, but applies on the contrary automatic and risky heuristics. It may then
be and we suggest that it is likely that these heuristics have to do with the
heuristics of least effort (envisaged by minmax theories) at play when
understanding utterances.
It is noticeable that some recent works in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
call for an epistemological change. A reflection of this is to be found in Hart
(2011), where he both pleads for an infusion of cognitive or evolutionary
psychology (EP) into CDA and details the impact of evidentiality (the grasping of
the source of information) on the persuasive efficiency of discourses; he finds his
inspiration in a range of works but in particular in the recent paper by Sperber et al.
(2010) on epistemic vigilance and in the trend of cognitive linguistics,
suggesting that the link between pragmatics, heuristics and Discourse Analysis
should be tightened. The central question that underlies the worries expressed in
these recent works (see also OHalloran 2005, Hart 2010, Chilton 2005, Oswald
2010, Reisigl 2011) is whether CDA should (and can) adapt vis vis these
newcomers in the field of persuasion in discourse, a crucial object of study for
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CDA.
1
That Discourse Analysis should rest on intuitive approaches makes it
a problem identified by Widdowson 2004 (among others): if not carefully drawn
from facts, methods and consistent theories, such considerations on discourses will
always appear to the sceptical opinions from biased intellectuals prompt to find in
the empirical material the confirmation of a priori conceptions.
There remains a problem: if consent to propositions is entirely a matter of
automatic heuristics, then believing is a deterministic process, just as
understanding is. Clearly, what a speaker is going to say is unpredictable (even
the conventions of speech use cannot predict whatever content; we can merely,
with some indeterminacy, surmise a preferred type of speech act); on the contrary,
what a hearer is going to interpret is clearly predictable on the simple basis of the
utterance concerned and a limited set of contextual assumptions. We may make
wrong predictions on this occasionally, but there are right predictions that can be
made if the model and the data are adequate. But there is more: speakers
themselves predict what their interlocutor is going to interpret, otherwise they
cannot hope to pass on a message unless by chance. Therefore, speakers have
a model of human natural understanding, according to which they shape their
communication (unconsciously), and which belongs to theory of mind (ToM). This
is the reason for which many pragmatic theories of the (post-)Gricean tradition,
now cognitive theories of meaning, focus on the process of understanding (as
Relevance Theory) and not on that of new speech acts. For Discourse Analysis, the
invited conclusion of this attitude is that, if the choice of words and linguistic
structures is not innocent, as posited by functional linguistics (see Halliday 1985
for instance) and rightfully consensually admitted, it is primarily because these
linguistic forms are destined to trigger cognitive effects according to ToM. But
what is at stake with CDA is one step further: from a solid prediction of
understanding, can we go up to a prediction on believing (which includes also
being trapped into some ideological set of beliefs, consciously or not)? Either the
answer is a clear no, and then the conclusion is that accepting a belief on the basis
of an utterance within a discourse and a context is a totally erratic and random type
of event; or the answer may be that believing is a type of situation which is only
favoured by this or that factor, but then one wonders what it is to favour if not the
confession of a deterministic process still unknown; the third answer is yes to some
extent (a full and plain yes seems unrealistic, given the amount of factors at play)
but then deterministic aspects must be part of the theory and admitted at a core
level of the whole process, and the scope of deterministic theory must be set,
relativism rightfully expanding below its border in terms of arbitrary and
conventional parameters. The fact is that I cannot choose to understand or to
believe. I do not apply any kind of conscious decision-making procedure or
evaluation when I understand a sentence or a discourse, when I derive an
implicature or extract a presupposition, and, obviously, when I come to believe
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a new proposition: this is out of the scope of will.
2
Therefore, these events cannot
happen without a stable natural determinist core of causalities, whatever complex it
may be, since when these events happen, my mind works them out without me
exerting any control on them. Needless to say, a deterministic attitude forces to
settle the scope of the scientific domain concerned. This is why cognitive
pragmatics, for instance (the type of which being Relevance Theory), has settled its
scope over understanding and more recently believing, not over determinations at
work when speakers involved in a conversation prefer, choose, or are anyway
driven, to say (this is the work of conversational analysis). If there are grounds
ultimately neurological grounds for assessing that some discursive patterns
exploit biases that are as unavoidable as, say, optical illusions (Pohl 2004 rightfully
calls cognitive illusions the cognitive biases known as heuristics in the
tradition of Tversky and Kahneman 1974, see also Caverni, Fabre and Gonzalez
1990), and that the devices that exploit them (for example metaphor, but there are
many others) are brought to light, then the aim of enhancing the critical literacy of
people will be better reached than it has, if at all, within mainstream CDA. Fruitful
attempts at providing cognitive, evolutionary models for discursive persuasion are
currently being developed with very promising explanative results; see works by
Maillat and Oswald 2009, 2011; Hart 2011, among others, who all attempt at
fulfilling the requests expressed by Chilton (2005) and van Dijk (in press).
Presupposition accommodation is an example of how pragmatic processes of
understanding come up in the picture and lead to the incorporation of fallacious
arguments in discourse.

3. Discursive presuppositions

Critical evaluation being a complex cognitive ability rather than the skilled
application of objective logical principles
3
, the line we draw between persuasion
and other types of communicative devices is not a line la Petty and Cacciopo
(1986) or anything strictly involving the rational vs. non-rational distinction.
We do not say that skilled rational evaluation should be disregarded; but, we
suggest, such evaluation happens at a reflexive stage of information processing,
whereas critical evaluation happens spontaneously in online treatment. Whatever
the existence or not of a critical module, we suggest that those cognitive
processes involve useful gaps, that is, they produce occasional errors as a trade
off for the gain of efficiency they bring in ordinary communication and interaction.
We suggest that the phenomenon of pragmatic presupposition accommodation is
one such thing. Presupposition accommodation is a crucial instrument of
communication (Stalnaker 2002), but, on occasions involving persuasion, it may
have deep consequences in the hearers cognitive environment, and on his
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Louis de Saussure

behaviour. In such cases, we posit that the mechanisms that lead an individual to
consent to information inconsistent with his background do not involve the
cancellation of one of the terms of the inconsistency and even go through without
the hearer noticing the issue at all. Unsurprisingly, if these mechanisms rely on
stable principles and are tied to general cognitive principles, speakers may
(intuitively or not) exploit them in persuasion. Our line of argument belongs to
a wider picture where fallacies, more generally, are efficient in persuasion because
they exploit the gaps left open by the pragmatic principles managing
communication in general, as a trade-off for their otherwise high efficiency and
usefulness in natural, ordinary situations of communication. If, as we suggest, the
type of inconsistent presupposition accommodation we address has to do with such
gaps, and those gaps are better captured in terms of cognitive biases or
cognitive illusions allowing for suggestionnability (Pohl 2004), and
furthermore can serve in argumentative structures as grounds for further,
necessarily still undue, assumptions, then it is fair to speak of a presupposition
bias related to the classical loaded question fallacy (or many questions, see
Greco 2003 who discusses Walton 1999).
Such processes, we suggest, rely on a more general bias in pragmatic
processing relative to the handling of previously held (or a priori) information.
That a piece of information is new or old changes crucially the way it is handled by
the cognitive apparatus. Distinctions such as topic vs. comment are commonly
understood as bearing relevant properties directly tied to the status of the
information as old (topic) or new (comment). In the domain of semantic and
pragmatic meanings, old information is typically carried by presuppositions,
themselves often assimilated to background information. A major difference
between information grasped as old or new is that new information (NI) is thought
of as relevant in its own right whereas old information (OI) is not. In informative
communication, searching for relevance forbids focusing on what is already known
because, of course, it does not bring any import. The presumption we have of the
relevance of ones utterance overlooks presuppositions as relevant information.
But presuppositions are nonetheless managed as a set of information participating
to the making up of relevance. From the point of view of meaning itself,
presuppositions must be true for the utterance to possibly be true or false, thus to
make any sense, regardless of whether they are understood as triggered lexically
(semantic presupposition) or as part of the contextual world which form the
background of the speaker and about which the proposition uttered applies as
a truth-value function (pragmatic presupposition, Stalnaker 1974). Presuppositions
may be of various kinds; but we suggest that some are incorporated not only
without lexical basis but in order to satisfy expectations of meaningfulness, or, we
suggest, of relevance in the sense of Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995), that is, in
order to maintain the presumption that the utterance is relevant. We suggest that
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(1) brings about such a presupposed proposition (2) in ordinary contexts as a way
to achieve relevance:

(1) I took my umbrella.
(2) It is raining or it will possibly rain when the speaker is out.

(2) is usually not analyzed as a presupposition but is assumed part of the
background knowledge of the interlocutors at utterance time. In the case (1) aims
at communicating overtly (2), (2) is an implicature. But the interesting case is
when (2) is not taken as being the target proposition in communication but
nonetheless incorporated in the background of the hearer at utterance time. We
come back to this after a few formal observations.
We notice that in ordinary contexts, grasping (2) is necessary to give relevance
to (1), although i) it is not itself focused by the speaker; ii) nor is it communicated
as relevant (at least not in the way an implicature would be); and iii) it is
considered already belonging to the background. Such presuppositions must occur
in the process of understanding for the utterance not only to bear a meaning but to
bear a relevant one in the circumstances. In what follows, we will call elements
like (2) discursive presuppositions, henceforth DP (see Saussure to appear for
developmentsandforaclarificationoftheirpresuppositionalstatus).
Such presuppositions raise two major problems in discourse. First, they are
accessed as pieces of information belonging to the background but they may not
actually be such, in which case they call for an accommodation, similarly to other
types of presuppositions. Second, in such cases, it becomes uneasy to assume that
they are not relevant: they bring about new information, and they do so
economically, without in-depth processing, as we shall discuss further down.
Therefore they are very much relevant: few efforts, possibly strong cognitive
effects (Sperber and WIlson 1986; 1995). DP subject to pragmatic accommodation
give thus relevance to what is presented as background. Yet, third, DP
accommodation can occur unduly (it brings in the cognitive environment an
inconsistent information with regard to the actual background without justification)
and this may happen without notice, that is, without critical evaluation. Even false
presuppositions are not always identified. In ordinary situations of communication,
expectedly, cognition reacts to presuppositional inconsistencies to some degree,
but to some degree only (presupposition accommodation happens within certain
limits, says Lewis 1979).
Interestingly, DPs are typically those contents of communication that favour
the acceptance of a fallacious argument.
4
We suggest that the accommodation of
DPs is similar to that of standard pragmatic presuppositions in that they can be
appropriate (if they actually belong to the shared background)orinappropriate
(if they do not belong to the background at utterance time and are not
uncontroversial; see von Fintel 2000, 2008). An example of inappropriate
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Louis de Saussure

presupposition accommodation is (3); inthe case the presupposition(3)doesnot
belongtothehearersbackground(vonFintel2000):

(3) O Dad, I forgot to tell you that myfiancandIaremovingtoSeattlenextweek.
(3)Thespeakerhasafianc.
(after von Fintel 2000)

(3) above is a case of pragmatic presupposition in the classical sense, but we
suggest that our notion of discursive presuppositions encompasses other
presuppositions, inasmuch as those presuppositions arise as requisites for relevance
(in a similar line, the search for relevance involves, but is not restricted, to lower-
level aspects of meaning). Two separate reasons are available to assess that (3)
triggersaninappropriateaccommodation(inthecontextwherethespeakersfather
does not know, prior to utterance time, that the speaker has a fianc). First, (3)
contradictsanassumptionstronglyheldbythe hearer(thespeakerdoesnothave
a fianc). Thus there is a possible matter of dispute in (4) (it is not
uncontroversial). Furthermore, it is normally relevant to a father that his
daughterhasafianc.Thepotentialrelevanceofaninformationforanindividual,
in communication or not, lies in the connection of the concerned information with
other, previously held, information, so that new information is in turn generated, in
particular (but obviously not only) about very practical things. The more
consequences information has for the cognitive environment, the richer the
information. As for ordinary communication, relevance has to do with the amount
of cognitive changes induced by information; for Sperber and Wilson (1986;
1995), the hearer seeks richer information, which optimally compensates for the
processingeffort.Thatthedaughterhasafianchasastrongimpactonlifeinthe
family. On the contrary, if an employee explains his being late by uttering, I had
to pick up my cat at the veterinarian (cf. von Fintel 2000 again), the
presupposition that the employee has a cat, even if previously unknown, does not
bear any practical relevance and cannot be counted as a case of illegitimate
presuppositional accommodation.
In the cases above, the information conveyed by the presupposition is
obviously grasped by the hearer in an unproblematic manner, in the context: that
thereistobesomerainjustifyingtakinganumbrella,thatthegirlhasafianc,are
unproblematic pieces of information (there is no issue of consistency, etc.). But in
many situations, inconsistent presuppositions can go through the system without
being identified and evaluated, so that the mind is vulnerable to persuasion and
manipulation in discourse. This, obviously, has to do with the fact that what is
presupposed (in whatever sense of the term) is not a normal subject of discussion,
and thus is not a normal thing subject to explicit rejection. As a matter of fact,
when a rejection of presuppositions happens, it is only at the cost of a specific
effort: addressing a presupposition in discourse involves departing from the normal
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flow of interaction and marks, symbolically, a deviance from what is expected
from the hearer, that, is, having the knowledge assumed as being already
established prior to utterance time. This is due to presuppositions being presented
as old information (OI): what is grasped as OI, being reputedly already held and
shared,ormutuallymanifest to the interlocutors (Sperber and Wilson 1986), will
not undergo the type of deeper processing and evaluation that new information
(NI) is subject to. This reflects in the specific semantic features of presupposition
(insensitivity to negation, in particular).
The way presuppositions, both in the classical and in the discursive sense, are
processed is thus specific: it is not prone to evaluation, at least not as contents in
focus are. Presuppositions are shallowly processed and, we may say, bypass
critical evaluation and more generally bypass the controls of relevance.
Shallow processing is a type of processing usually described at the level of
conceptual change of lexical meaning under the pressure of maintaining the logical
consistency of the proposition. Shallow processing happens when the contents of
a conceptual expression in an utterance gets loosened to minimal information in
order to fit with a plausible informative intention, so that the presumption of
relevance is maintained (for the notion, see Carpenter and Just 1983; for
a discussion and application to persuasive discourse see Allott 2005).
5
At the level
of presuppositions, it is arguable that accommodation happens on the basis of
a similar process of surface treatment, a variant at the propositional level of
shallow processing at that of conceptual modulation. In any case, discursive
presuppositions are incorporated in the cognitive environment of the hearer as pre-
conditions to relevance, and that, being presented as old theyarenotsubjectto
(further)discussion(vonFintel2008: 138) they tend to be incorporated without
being filtered by automatic controls of relevance.
Presuppositions normally escape discursive moves (they are usually left
unquestioned). Semantic and discursive properties of presuppositions go hand in
hand: presuppositions are true whatever the truth-value of the proposition building
on it, and their truth is left unquestioned. It is known since Ducrot (1972) that
presuppositions are not truth-evaluable, therefore an answer like itsfalse is not
expected to arise in order to scope over presuppositions.
6
Such facts are widely
documented and well-known. It can be said that the discursive means at the
disposal of an interlocutor in order to address the validity of presuppositions in
discourse all imply to break the normal flow of discourse, which can be conceived
either as a set of conventions or, as we would rather suggest, as set up by
expectations of relevance. For example, saying wait a minute is a common
means to introduce the questioning of a presupposition, but such a conversational
move interrupts the normality of discursive exchanges, or, shall we say, dissatisfies
the interlocutors expectations of relevance: questioning presuppositions is not
a relevant contribution to the topic at stake in the circumstances.
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Louis de Saussure

But questioning presuppositions involves also relevance at another level, in fact
more interesting to Discourse Analysis: questioning a presupposition has the effect
of denying, or challenging, the relevance of the utterance since a presupposition
is always a condition to relevance. Challenging relevance, that is, implicitly
claiming that the former utterance does not satisfy the presumption of optimal
relevance, is indeed a very strong move, thus dispreferred, in interaction. So that,
questioning a presupposition is not only dispreferred because of what is expected
as a relevant contribution in the exchange, but also because doing so threatens the
face, in Goffmanian terms, of the former interlocutor. And finally, questioning
a presupposition amounts to admitting that what was presented as background old
informationwasactuallynotsuchinthehearersmind,whichamountstoavowing
ignorance, another potential face-threatening event, but, this time, for the speaker
himself.
There is more. Challenging presuppositions, we claim, is not only
a dispreferred move in interaction but also a dispreferred cognitive operation. Let
us shortly elaborate on this point.
Attributing relevance to an utterance is normally the result of a rather simple
process, according to Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995): information is inferred
from the utterance so that the information compensates for the processing effort.
Thus, there is a control that applies to both cognitive effects and processing effort
so that as soon as the inferred information matches the threshold of equilibrium
between those two variables, the hearer takes the interpretation as accurate.
Discursive presuppositions, being background reasons for saying or, better,
necessary conditions for relevance, form the implicit ground on which
a speech act is produced. Hence presuppositions are active in setting the threshold
of relevance to higher than zero, so to say, but are not grasped as the speakers
point. This happens even with undue presuppositions that get accommodated in
order to preserve, in the hearers mind, the presumption that the utterance is
relevant. This in turn implies a strong cognitive hypothesis: it can be, at least on
occasions, more important for the hearer to maintain the assumption that the
utterance preserves the presumption of relevance than to concede, even with strong
available evidences in some cases, that it does not. Suffices, we suggest, that some
contextual features are present to reinforce the assumption that the utterance is
relevant in the circumstances.
Discursive presuppositions are remote from coded meaning, as implicatures
are, but contrary to presuppositions attached to lexical items, which are, precisely,
tied to the coded meaning.
7
DP, as implicatures, are not formally mandatory (but
other presuppositions, in principle, are, although there are a number of unclear
cases). DP, just as implicatures, are defeasible (that lexical presuppositions are
defeasible too may be true but only by means of complex devices such as external,
wide scope, negation). Still, DP share crucial properties of presuppositions proper:
49
DOI: 10.1515/lpp-2012-0004

they imply a lower degree of awareness and are not focused on as relevant. In turn,
they escape controls of relevance, and in turn, they are indeed relevant if sticking
to a pure economical definition: they are economically incorporated, since they are
not evaluated by relevance-checking procedures. Despite appearances, this is not
a paradox: a DP is not checked for relevance, is directly processed and its content
is directly incorporated; as it is informational, it is effect-producing; as it involves
little cost, it is relevant.
Since relevance is conditioned by several requisites, such as consistency,
a piece of information that can escape relevance-checking procedures might escape
consistency checking procedures too and, as a consequence, might escape critical
evaluation. We suggest that this feature is the ground of their persuasive power.
We suggested above that the fact that such presuppositions go unnoticed through
the system may have to do with processes of shallow processing. We will
discuss this issue in the next section and take a closer look on two examples of
such speech acts, where a new piece of information is communicated through
a presupposition accommodation. We call such speech acts background
assertions.

4. Application: two cases of background assertion

In this section, we will examine two cases where the accommodation of
discursive presuppositions not only can be fairly well considered inappropriate,
but also presuppositions get incorporated without being questioned. The first case
is like an experimental one (although it is not a serious experimental case), and
serves to illustrate how obvious errors arise on the basis of discursive
presupposition accommodation. In the second case, we extrapolate the same
mechanisms to an empirical, real-world, situation.

4.1. Friday the 13th

Oswald (2010) reports that a French journalist and humorist Philippe Vandel
went on the streets in 1999 with a camera and microphone, telling people that
specialists had calculated that New Years Day 2000 would be a Friday the 13
th
,
and asking people if they were afraid. The persons questioned would answer the
question, saying that they are afraid or that they are not afraid, but would not react
to the inconsistency that the 1
st
of January cannot be the 13
th
(at least those many
people on the show did not).
8
Oswald (2010) suggests that Friday the 13
th
gets
shallowly processedassomedateassociatedwithsuperstitionsothatthedates
(13
th
and 1
st
) are not indeed compared.
9
But, while to some persons Vandel says:
50
Louis de Saussure

It has been calculated thatNewYearsday2000willbeFriday the 13
th
,toothers
hementionsexplicitlythedatesinfull,saying:thatthe1
st
of January 2000 will
be Friday the 13
th
, without the full wording of the date affecting the effect.
10

Arguably, with a Friday the 13
th
story, as Oswald (2010: 377378) suggests,
shallow processing happens. But Oswald assumes that the shallow processing
happens at the level of lexical/conceptual correction. This would nicely explain
why elements in the background are ruled out, such as survivors are alive or
New Years Day is a 1
st
(of January). In their extensive work on the role of
context in manipulation, Maillat and Oswald (2009, 2011) suggest that various
devices lead the hearer to a narrower-than-necessary contextualization (in our
terms), which keeps some critical information away from the context of
interpretation (assuming that there is a context of interpretation which consists in
a selection of available propositions taken as premises in the inference). Shallow
processing achieves indeed such a process of keeping away those assumptions that
are inconsistent. But there is a striking fact which does not fit very well with this
picture of Friday the 13
th
being treated as some superstitious day without
further considerations: the information that New Years Day 2000 is Friday the
13
th
gets sufficiently incorporated in (possibly temporary) beliefs on the hearers
side to allow for further developments. People saying they are not superstitious are
asked by Vandel to confirm thattheywillcelebrateNewYearsEveasusual,that
is, on Thursday the 12
th
(our translation). Thursday the 12
th
is not in any way
associated with superstition and gets hardly accommodated the way Friday the
13
th
is.ItisgraspedasthedaybeforethatonealreadyknownasNewYearsDay.
The fact that one is going to celebrate on Thursday the 12th is the result of an
inference taking <Friday the 13
th
is New Years Day> as premise, not some
superstitious day. Thus, it is not only that a background knowledge like a New
YearsDayisa1
st
is simply not retrieved because of shallow processing, but also
that once ruled out by other presupposed assumptions brought in by the utterance
here:thataNewYearsDaycanbea13
th
the latter are solid enough to allow for
further inferences still inconsistent with deeper background assumptions.
In a Friday the 13
th
case, we suggest, shallow processing is indeed achieved in
order to maintain the presumption of relevance, but shallow processing does not
always involve merely exchanging a meaning for a lighter one: it implies not
worrying about the literal meaning of the utterance, but it also allows for possibly
taking it for granted, which seems the opposite. With the Moses-illusion (see
endnote 5), the name Moses gets modified in a way that makes the utterance
compatible with Noah (typically some guy in the Bible). But with a discursive
presupposition accommodation of the type we are discussing, shallow processing
amounts to maintain the inconsistency at a lower level of consciousness. It may
well be, after all, that shallow processing proper of the type occurring in the
Moses-illusion does not fully cancel the notion which is changed, but this is
51
DOI: 10.1515/lpp-2012-0004

food for other inquiries. In our case, the journalist first tells a fact: it has been
calculatedthatandthenraisesaquestionwhich presupposes thatfact(areyou
afraid?). Thus when processing the question, that the 1
st
of January will be the
13
th
is already treated as a presupposition; it would have not been the case,
probably,withaquestionlikeisthispossible?Duringonlineprocessing,critical
evaluation is complex because of the time it takes; our assumption is that the
information getsactuallyincorporatedinthe hearers setofbeliefsonly whenthe
question, presupposing its truth, is raised. At this point, we speculate that
a presupposition accommodation occurs: the proposition about New Years Eve
being a Friday the 13
th
is first suspended, then immediately consented to through
accommodation when the question, immediately following the statement, arises.
What is more, such accommodated background assumptions are strong enough
to allow for further inferences, similarly to what is the case with presuppositions in
general. The factors influencing this process have probably to do with the fact that
the presumption of relevance is made stronger by the situation: the speaker has all
the apparatus of the professional journalist and will hardly be suspected of joking.
Yet this is not explicative, since, first, other possible nonsensical presuppositions
will be ruled out, for example if what is said or presupposed contradicts direct
perceptive evidence, and, according to the authors own experience, on the other
hand, a Friday the 13
th
effect can happen to hearers in ordinary conversation
without any further device enforcing trust. In the above case, we insist, the
information at issue is presented as out of thefocusofthequestion(whichisare
you afraid), therefore acting like presupposed information at the time where the
question is raised.

4.2. The minarets case

So far, we addressed the problem dealing with pragmatics, understanding and
cognition, but it may be unclear that we are dealing with discursive issues proper.
But we are indeed: we are dealing with language used in a certain setting with
certain wordings which lead to drastically influence the set of beliefs be it
temporary or not of individuals. It is not because the above case has no impact on
social life, is an intuitive experiment that shows how much presupposed
information is strong and efficient in persuasion, that the issue it brings about is not
of the same kind as those arising in real-life situations involving discourse and
influence. Our second case aims at showing precisely how very similar things may
happen in the sociopolitical world, or, at least, that a number of events happening
in the world and involving discourse can be interpreted the same way as we did
with the pseudo-experimentalFridaythe13
th
case.
52
Louis de Saussure

On Nov. 29
th
, 2009, the Swiss population was called to vote for or against the
proposition (made by a political party usually classified right-wing) to ban the
construction of minarets in the country. The result of the vote was a strong
majority (above 57%) of yes.
11
Many explanations were proposed in the media,
mostly grounded on the idea that this decision was not rational; most
commentators proposed socio-cultural or psychosocial explanations, notably based
on the fear of the stranger, exclusion, impulse of cultural and ethnic protection, and
lack of communication by the federal authorities. Yet no attention was paid to the
clash between the presupposition accommodations involved in the question
submitted to vote and background knowledge expectedly available to the hearers.
12

In effect, for the question to be relevant, the following has to be true or likely to be
true:

a) There is a relevant number of minarets actually in place or projected.
b) Minarets could substantially modify and destroy Swiss landscapes.
c) Minarets are a threat of some type.

Since a) b) form distinct types of meanings invited by the question, dealing with
a priori background assumptions and not with logical consequences of the
question, we prefer not to assimilate these with what Sperber and Wilson call
weak implicatures (although they may resort in the end to the same overall
category, but this point is out of the present discussion).
Assumption a) is needed for reasons of relevance: it is not relevant to ask about
the banning of non-existing things (although, we insist, it is not a logical
consequence of banning as a concept: one can decide banning the import of British
beef even in a country where no British beef was ever imported so far).
But most people never saw a minaret in Switzerland: only three existed at the
time of vote, all in suburban areas. It is plausible that many people simply did not
have any assumption at all about the projects of building new minarets (which also
virtually did not exist), so that the accommodation of such a DP is open.
Assumption b) omits the well-known fact that there are strong laws
constraining constructions and preserving landscapes; this may have not been
known by some people, but for a huge majority of people, this knowledge is likely
to be manifest.
What is more interesting is assumption c), which is, without further elaboration,
nonsensical thus not relevant. Yet it is not irrelevant the way tautologies are, or the
way contradictions are. It is not relevant the way properties attributed to things that
cannot bear them are not relevant (it may be argued that this is a type of
inconsistency or contradiction, though). And as with other cases of the sort, c)
invites a certain reinterpretation of minarets, a bit like what happens with
metaphors and metonymies. Nonetheless, the proposition c), which was
communicated with means of propaganda by the promoting party (they made
53
DOI: 10.1515/lpp-2012-0004

posters showing minarets shaped as missiles crushing the national flag), was
a strong argument. Anyway, assumption c) is necessary since there is no reason to
think of forbidding something which has no relation to a threat of some sort (be it
to peaceful living). It is necessary, thus, as a precondition to the relevance of the
question put to vote.
These assumptions, being necessary for the presumption of relevance to be
preserved, were thus considered true by the people at least by those who did not
vote only because of bad feelings against Muslims or for other irrational reasons
(an educated person, it was reported to me, said, while having a walk in the quaint
villages of the southern Swiss Alps, shortlybeforethevotingday:I wouldntlike
a minaretaroundhere. Also, certainly, that the government did not appropriately
communicate on this topic is correct; but such a mistake is explainable if
considering that government members might well have considered (be in non-
consciously) that presupposed assumptions in a) c) would be straight away
identified as false, expecting the consequence that the right-wing party would lose
the vote and, as a result, credibility. Yet the opposite happened: these discursive
presuppositions were incorporated, or some adaptation of them, through shallow
processing. The danger of minarets presupposition, for example, might have
beenaccommodatedinametonymicformofdangerofIslamism.
There is much more to add on the minarets story, notably on the background
assumptions that voters might have in terms of stereotypes, etc., and the analysis
above is of course very partial. Our point is however that both cases (Friday the
13th and the minarets) have in common to bring new assumptions in the form of
presupposed background information, which rule out (momentarily or not) a priori
strongassumptions.Expectedly,askingpeoplewhethertheythinkthatNewYears
Day can possibly be a Friday the 13
th
, or if there are many minarets in Switzerland,
would have lead to other results completely.
In such cases, the utterance gains relevance mostly not because of the
implicatures it leads to but because of the background it needs to incorporate. This
happensthesame wayaswhenanutterancelike(1)(Itookanumbrella),if(2)
(Itsraining/Itmayrain)does not belong to the background, gains relevance by
means of incorporating it into the actual background.

5. Conclusions: interdisciplinarity for good

In the domain of humanities and social sciences, debates have secularly but
with a particular emphasis in some domains, such as language, and at some periods
of the history of thought, such as the twentieth century focused on the dichotomy
between nature and culture. Currently, only a few scholars working on human
behaviour (in the largest sense of the notion) still think that what appears
54
Louis de Saussure

culturalorconventionalmightbecompletelydisconnectedfrombasicrootsin
the architecture of the human mind, or that the human brain is plastic enough to
achieve realizations that can exist without anything common in one human and
another. The debate is somehow over: there is too much evidence, in particular
from developmental psychology, that what we call cultural artefacts, habitus, the
overall way people cooperate and organise their activities in social structures, are
not pure arbitrary things (thus not caused and not to be explained) but tied to
mechanisms that stabilized through evolution. That there exist striking differences
across cultures might then be a very secondary matter when compared to what
makes humans so fundamentally similar. Jackendoff (2009) makes an enlightening
comparison between the organization of societies and that of languages, which all
share a common fundamental structure, differences being, at this level of
examination, superficial. This in no way means that those differences are not
indeed fascinating, but their study opens to an immense array of data showing the
immense variety of realizations of what is nonetheless a common natural core.
Certainly, there is no denying that socio-cultural factors do intervene in the facts
that Discourse Analysis aims at capturing. Yet the simple point this paper aims at
bringing about is that socio-cultural factors do not make up an explanation alone.
The fact that some representations are better shared in a given culture (which is
neither a matter of pragmatics nor of Discourse Analysis proper but of social
psychology, anthropology and sociology) is not something happening at random
but because the human mind seeks some advantage in incorporating these
representations in a given context (Sperber and al. 2010). Similarly, the fact that
speakers succeed with their utterances (and thus with their discourses) in
convincing and persuading, and even that people with no particular intentions will
reproduce ideologies they are not aware of, is not a cultural thing entirely.
Certainly that relations of power, symbolic status, face, etc., take part in the
reception of discourses is not debatable: these are elements that have to be present
in the description of discourses. But these facts have roots in how the human
experience is reflected in the cognitive system.
Through the example of discursive presuppositions, this paper aimed at
showing that understanding, which is a natural spontaneous cognitive process, does
end up with consequences on what is felt believable or what is consented to. This
is not to say that understanding determinates believing in a strict sense, because all
propositions occurring in the mind can be subject to reflexive or even intuitive
evaluation, all processes coming up at an ulterior stage (which are concerned with
cognitive processes of a wider scope as posited by Dawkins 1989 or, closer to the
epistemology of this paper, epistemic vigilance, Sperber et al. 2010). It remains to
be mentioned that what we observed about discursive presuppositions certainly has
to do with a number of other cognitive biases that anchor on a notion of what is
taken to be already known (de Saussure forthcoming) and that a number of
55
DOI: 10.1515/lpp-2012-0004

fallacious arguments ground their efficiency in mental heuristics which are not
error-prone, so that they are efficient, at least partly, as a result of how they are
understood. With the consequence that they are exploited in persuasive discourse
and manipulation, a topic, it seems, not indifferent to Discourse Analysis.
13

Notes

1
van Dijk (2008, to appear) also addresses this issue in his attempt to reconcile
a mental model with a context model.
2
Obviously thisholdsforwishfulthinking too which is not about conscious will.
3
A suggestion made by Dawkins (1976), Sperber et al. (2010), Chilton (2005),
Hart (2011), van Dijk (in press), among others.
4
Van Dijk (1998) shows that presuppositions can be pragmatic in the sense we
give to the notion in this paper, with the following dialogue, on which Rocci
(2005) elaborates the proposal that such presupposed material has to do with
coherence or congruity :
A : A burglar brokeintoAuntJulieshouse
B : Thats hardly surprising. Havent you seen all these coloured people hanging
around lately ? (van Dijk 1998:206).
Previously, Ducrot (1972:51) addressed fallacious presupposition (coup de force
prsuppositionnel) already with a concern for argumentation.
5
Aclassicalexampleof shallowprocessingisthe survivorsjoke where oneis
asked where should be buried the survivors of a plane crash which happens on the
exact border of two countries (also discussed in Oswald 2010). In that case,
arguably, the expression survivors is changed into the superordinate category
(hyperonym) of human beings, so that the presumption of relevance is
maintained at the cost of (unconscious) semantic rectification. The very similar
Mosesillusion (Reder and Kusbit 1991) where one is asked how many animals
Moses (instead of Noah) puts in the Ark, is similar, but it is at the same time
noticeable that the question presupposes that Moses took animals in the Ark. In
other cases, only vague connotations are kept from the word, as when the US
officials said that the war in Iraq was a promotion of democracy, whatever this
may mean (Allott 2005).
6
This feature appears most strikingly with presuppositions in questions, which
cannot be truth-evaluated; only the question in focus itself allows for an answer in
discourse:
A:DidJohnfailhisexamination?[presupposesJohnwenttotheexamination]
B:*Itsfalse.Hestayedathome.
B: Yes / No
56
Louis de Saussure

7
At least in a way implicatures are not, but closer, probably to what explicatures
are (see Carston 2009 for an overview of the explicit/implicit distinction in
relevance theory).
8
This happened in France; translations are ours. Full video on :
http://www.philippevandel.com/2009/01/le-jour-de-l-an.html
9
Sperber (personal communication, 2011) suggests a similar analysis.
10
This is not a scientific experiment, thus it is not known if some people reacted to
the inconsistency. But the fact that the many people on the show did not react is
enough to address this case. Furthermore, it is the experience of the author that
even in conversational settings, the effect generally happens.
11
Although with a high level of abstention.
12
A voting question in Switzerland takes the following form : Do you accept the
proposition of law that. What matters to us in this story is not about the
linguistic wording but the fact that such a question on banning the minarets, in
itself and independantly of the linguistic form it takes, involves presupposed
assumptions.

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About the Author
Louis de Saussure is Professor of Linguistics and Discourse Analysis at the
University of Neuchtel. He formerly taught at the University of Texas at
Austin, the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the
Universities of Geneva, Lugano and Fribourg. He was visiting researcher at
University College London and at the French CNRS in Nancy. He pursues
research mostly in the fields of pragmatics, French linguistics and discourse
analysis, all envisaged from a cognitive pragmatics perspective.

Address
Chair of Linguistics and Discourse Analysis
Department of Linguistics and Communication Science
UniversityofNeuchtel
Avenue du 1er-Mars 26 2000, Neuchtel,Switzerland
e-mail: louis.desaussure@unine.ch


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