Surprisal and Satisfaction: Towards an Information-theoretic Characterization of Presuppositions with a Diachronic Application

Abstract

The paper offers a pilot study concerned with presuppositions in historical data, which are identified and annotated on the basis of six triggers, viz. three for additives, and three for factives. It brings together information extraction and annotation on (A) the satisfaction/binding and (B) information-theoretic surprisal values of presuppositions. An initial (naive) hypothesis is that the two lines of investigation converge, but this only turned out to be the case for factives in the data inspected. The work conducted relates two strands of research: information theory (Shannon 1948, Fankhauser et al. 2014, DegaetanoOrtlieb et al. 2016) and the semantic theory of presuppositions (Stalnaker 1973, Heim 1983, Schwarz 2014, 2016). Furthermore, the study begins to connect two methodological points relevant for studies concerned with the diachronic evolution of meaning and structure but not approached jointly so far: syntactically parsed data and information-theoretically calculated predictors on semantic phenomena. Using such tools, the paper offers an initial description, a discussion of methodological issues, and some empirical results such as the existence of two crystallizing major classes of triggers during the Early Modern English period, which may be indicative of the distinction between informative and run-of-the-mill presuppositions. While the focus of the paper is on the early modern period (that is, roughly, the sixteenth and the seventeenth century), a short outlook on Late Modern English (the subsequent two centuries) is offered.