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# 33. Implicature and presupposition

**On this page**

1. [1. Grice and the maxims](#1-grice-and-the-maxims)
2. [2. Scalar implicatures: the French scales](#2-scalar-implicatures-the-french-scales)
3. [3. Other conversational implicatures](#3-other-conversational-implicatures)
4. [4. Conventional implicatures](#4-conventional-implicatures)
5. [5. Presupposition and its triggers](#5-presupposition-and-its-triggers)
6. [6. Behaviour under negation, questions and embedding](#6-behaviour-under-negation-questions-and-embedding)
7. [7. *Présupposé* and *sous-entendu*: the French tradition](#7-présupposé-and-sous-entendu-the-french-tradition)
8. [8. Metalinguistic negation and cancellation](#8-metalinguistic-negation-and-cancellation)
9. [9. Clefts and focus](#9-clefts-and-focus)
10. [10. Triggers in the treebanks](#10-triggers-in-the-treebanks)
11. [11. What the research has found](#11-what-the-research-has-found)
12. [How Mova handles it](#how-mova-handles-it)
13. [Sources](#sources)

A sentence means more than it says. *Certains étudiants ont réussi* suggests that not all did. *Il a arrêté de fumer* takes for granted that he used to smoke. *Il a réussi à ouvrir la porte* suggests that it was hard. This chapter describes the two main kinds of inference of this sort in French: **implicatures**, which the hearer draws by reasoning about why the speaker said what they said, and **presuppositions**, which the form of the sentence itself requires to be taken for granted. It lists the French scales and triggers, the way inferences behave under negation and questions, the French tradition of *présupposé* and *sous-entendu*, the French conventional implicatures (*mais*, *pourtant*, *même*, *d'ailleurs*), the counts of the triggers in the open treebanks (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06), what the open research has found, and what Mova does today.

Contents

1. [Grice and the maxims](#1-grice-and-the-maxims)
2. [Scalar implicatures: the French scales](#2-scalar-implicatures-the-french-scales)
3. [Other conversational implicatures](#3-other-conversational-implicatures)
4. [Conventional implicatures](#4-conventional-implicatures)
5. [Presupposition and its triggers](#5-presupposition-and-its-triggers)
6. [Behaviour under negation, questions and embedding](#6-behaviour-under-negation-questions-and-embedding)
7. [*Présupposé* and *sous-entendu*: the French tradition](#7-pr%C3%A9suppos%C3%A9-and-sous-entendu-the-french-tradition)
8. [Metalinguistic negation and cancellation](#8-metalinguistic-negation-and-cancellation)
9. [Clefts and focus](#9-clefts-and-focus)
10. [Triggers in the treebanks](#10-triggers-in-the-treebanks)
11. [What the research has found](#11-what-the-research-has-found)
12. [How Mova handles it](#how-mova-handles-it)

---

## 1. Grice and the maxims

Grice's account starts from a **cooperative principle**: make your contribution as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the exchange. Four groups of maxims follow (French: *maximes de quantité, de qualité, de relation, de manière*):

| maxim | in short | French example of use | inference |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Quantity** | be as informative as required, not more | *Tu as mangé ? — J'ai pris un sandwich.* | a sandwich was all |
| **Quality** | say what you believe true, with evidence | *Il doit être là.* | I infer it, I do not know it |
| **Relation** | be relevant | *Tu viens ? — J'ai du travail.* | no |
| **Manner** | be clear, brief, orderly | *Elle a ouvert la porte et elle est entrée.* | in this order |

An **implicature** is what the hearer concludes on the assumption that the speaker follows the principle. It is **calculable** (derived from the sentence, its context and the maxims), **cancellable** (it can be denied without contradiction) and **non-detachable** (it goes with the content, not the wording). *Certains étudiants ont réussi, voire tous* cancels the "not all"; *Certains étudiants ont réussi ; en fait, tous* the same.

**Generalised** implicatures arise in nearly all contexts (the scalar ones); **particularised** ones depend on the particular context. The classic French example of the second kind: *Il y a une station-service au coin de la rue* in answer to *Je suis en panne d'essence*. It is relevant only if the station is open, and the hearer draws the inference that it is.

## 2. Scalar implicatures: the French scales

Horn's scale idea: items of a scale are ordered by informativeness, and to use a weaker item implicates that the stronger ones do not hold. French scales:

| scale (weak → strong) | example | implicature |
| --- | --- | --- |
| ⟨*quelques*, *plusieurs*, *beaucoup*, *la plupart*, *tous*⟩ | *Plusieurs invités sont partis.* | not all |
| ⟨*certains*, *la plupart*, *tous*⟩ | *Certains ont voté pour.* | not all |
| ⟨*parfois*, *souvent*, *toujours*⟩ | *Il est parfois en retard.* | not always |
| ⟨*jamais*, … ⟩ and ⟨*peu*, *pas beaucoup*, *aucun*⟩ | *Peu ont répondu.* | some did |
| ⟨*possible*, *probable*, *certain*⟩ | *Il est possible qu'il vienne.* | not certain |
| ⟨*peut-être*, *probablement*, *sûrement*, *certainement*⟩ | *Il viendra peut-être.* | not probable |
| ⟨*pouvoir*, *devoir*⟩ | *Vous pouvez partir.* | not obliged to |
| ⟨*ou*, *et*⟩ | *Du thé ou du café ?* | exclusive "or" (not both) |
| ⟨*un peu*, *assez*, *très*, *extrêmement*⟩ | *C'est assez bon.* | not very good |
| ⟨*bon*, *excellent*⟩, ⟨*tiède*, *chaud*, *brûlant*⟩ | *C'est bon.* | not excellent |
| ⟨*essayer*, *réussir*⟩ | *Il a essayé de l'ouvrir.* | perhaps did not succeed |
| numerals: ⟨*deux*, *trois*⟩ | *Elle a deux enfants.* | exactly two |
| ⟨*commencer à*, *finir de*⟩ | *Il a commencé son livre.* | not finished |
| ⟨*au moins*, *exactement*, *au plus*⟩ |  |  |

The **exclusive reading of *ou*** is a well-known case. French *ou* is inclusive in logic and exclusive by implicature in many contexts (*Café ou thé ?*); *ou bien* and *soit … soit …* make the exclusive reading explicit: *Soit tu viens, soit tu restes*. The numeral is "at least *n*" in meaning and "exactly *n*" by implicature: *Elle a trois enfants — et même quatre* is a cancellation that is not contradictory.

**Cancellation and suspension** are explicit: *voire* (*Certains, voire tous les participants …*), *même* (*Certains, et même la plupart …*), *en fait* (*Certains. En fait, tous.*), *si ce n'est tous* (*Certains, si ce n'est tous, ont …*), *ou plutôt* (*Il est content, ou plutôt ravi*). The scalar inference is also blocked in some contexts: under negation (*Il n'a pas lu certains livres* does not implicate that he has read all the others), in the antecedent of a conditional (*S'il lit plusieurs de ces livres, il comprendra*), and when the speaker's knowledge is limited (the inference "not all" becomes "I do not know that all").

**The hearer's computation.** The standard model, which many experiments confirm, treats the scalar inference as a step taken after the literal reading, at a cost. The Rational Speech Acts model (Frank and Goodman 2012) derives it as the choice by a listener of the reading that a rational speaker would most likely have meant by the sentence over the alternatives. Mova implements the model for small closed games in English (see below).

## 3. Other conversational implicatures

### 3.1 Relation: indirect answers

An answer that does not literally answer the question can be read as one by relevance: *Tu viens à la soirée ? — J'ai un examen demain.* means no. *Tu aimes ce vin ? — Il est cher.* means perhaps no, or perhaps yes with a qualification. A study of **indirect answers** to polar questions in French and Spanish film and series subtitles (Müller & Plank 2024, `muller-2024-indirectqa-understanding-indirect-answers-implicit`, a non-commercial paper that informs but is not quoted) notes that such answers are natural in dialogue and still hard for conversational systems, and that the questions need not have the form of a question (an *implicit polar question* is a statement that invites a yes or a no). The French words that signal the inference are the marks of a dispreferred answer (*Eh bien …*, *Ben …*, *Euh …*) and those of indirectness (*Ça dépend*, *Je ne sais pas*, *Disons que …*): see [chapter 38](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers/).

### 3.2 Quality: irony and understatement

When the speaker says what they do not believe, or says too little, the hearer infers a different meaning: *Quel beau temps !* in the rain, *Ce n'est pas mal* for something excellent, *Il fait un peu frais* in a gale. These are treated in [chapter 34](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/34-irony-and-figurative-language/).

### 3.3 Manner: marked forms

A marked form implicates a marked meaning. *Il a fait en sorte que la porte soit ouverte* implicates something unusual about the way, by contrast with *Il a ouvert la porte*. *Je ne dis pas non* (litotes) implicates that the speaker is rather willing. *Elle a réussi à trouver une place* implicates, through the verb *réussir à*, that there was a difficulty, a conventional implicature or a presupposition according to the analysis. A *double negative* of the type *Ce n'est pas impossible* implicates "possible, but not very probable".

### 3.4 Questions and politeness

A question implicates that the speaker does not know the answer and wants to; a rhetorical question violates that and implicates the opposite assertion (*Qui pourrait le croire ?*). The politeness of a request lies in its implicatures (*Tu as l'heure ?*): the hearer is to infer that the speaker is asking for the time, not whether the hearer possesses one ([chapter 31](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/31-speech-acts/)).

## 4. Conventional implicatures

A **conventional implicature** is a meaning attached by convention to a particular word, which does not affect the truth conditions of the sentence but is not cancellable like a conversational implicature. French has many, mostly in connectives and adverbs (the French theory of **argumentation in the language** of Ducrot and Anscombre makes them its centre; it is known to us by name and cards only).

| word | conventional meaning | example | what is implicated |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| ***mais*** | contrast with an expectation | *Il est pauvre mais honnête.* | being poor goes against being honest, in the speaker's view |
| ***pourtant*** | concession: the opposite of what the previous statement would suggest | *Il a étudié ; pourtant il a échoué.* | one expects the opposite result |
| ***même*** | the item is at the unlikely end of a scale | *Même Pierre est venu.* | Pierre was the least likely to come |
| ***d'ailleurs*** | an additional, secondary argument | *Je ne viendrai pas ; d'ailleurs, je suis malade.* | the second reason is a bonus |
| ***quand même*** | despite everything | *Il est quand même venu.* | one expected him not to |
| ***donc*** | consequence, inference | *Il pleut ; donc je reste.* | the second follows from the first |
| ***seulement*** / ***ne … que*** | the item is the only one, and few | *Il n'y a que Pierre.* | Pierre is the only one, and that is little |
| ***déjà*** | earlier than expected | *Il est déjà parti.* | he was expected to leave later |
| ***encore*** | persistence, or repetition | *Il pleut encore.* | it was raining before |
| ***toujours*** | continuity | *Il habite toujours ici.* | he lived here before |
| ***enfin*** | after delay or as a correction | *Il est enfin arrivé.* | it took long |
| ***bien*** | affirmation against a doubt | *Il est bien parti.* | someone doubted it |
| ***tout de même***, ***pourtant***, ***néanmoins*** | concession |  |  |
| ***voire*** | the following is stronger | *Utile, voire indispensable.* |  |
| ***ne … plus*** | cessation | *Il ne fume plus.* | he used to smoke (presupposition) |

*Mais* is the best studied. It marks a contrast of "argument" (the first segment would lead to a conclusion that the second one denies): *Il est riche mais avare* (the conclusion "he is generous" suggested by "rich" is denied). A *mais* with two statements neither of which opposes the other is odd (**Il est riche mais grand*) unless the context supplies the argument. The conventions of *donc*, *alors*, *mais*, *car* and *puisque* as discourse connectives are in [chapter 36](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/36-discourse-relations/).

## 5. Presupposition and its triggers

A **presupposition** is information that the sentence takes for granted: its content must be part of the common ground for the sentence to be appropriate. The speaker can use it to convey it as already known. A **trigger** is the word or construction that produces it.

| trigger type | French triggers | example | presupposes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **definite description** | *le/la/les* + noun, demonstratives, possessives, proper names | *Le roi de France est chauve.* *Sa voiture est en panne.* | there is a king of France; he has a car |
| **change of state** | *cesser de, arrêter de, commencer à, se mettre à, devenir, quitter, ne … plus, partir* | *Il a arrêté de fumer.* | he used to smoke |
| **continuation** | *continuer à/de, rester, toujours, encore, poursuivre, maintenir* | *Il continue à travailler.* *Le gouvernement poursuit ses efforts.* | he was working; efforts existed |
| **iterative** | *encore, de nouveau, à nouveau, re-/ré-* (*revenir, redire, retourner, refaire*), *une fois de plus* | *Il est revenu.* *Il pleut de nouveau.* | he had been here; it had rained |
| **additive** | *aussi, également, même, non plus, ni … ni* | *Marie vient aussi.* *Marie ne vient pas non plus.* | someone else comes / does not come |
| **factive verb** | *savoir que, regretter que, oublier que, s'apercevoir que, se rendre compte que, apprendre que, ignorer que* | *Il regrette que tu sois parti.* | you left |
| **factive adjective** | *content que, heureux que, surpris que, étonné que, dommage que, triste que, fier que* | *Je suis content qu'il soit venu.* | he came |
| **implicative verb** | *réussir à, parvenir à, oser, daigner, manquer de, avoir tort/raison de, penser à* | *Il a réussi à ouvrir la porte.* *Il n'a pas osé répondre.* | he tried; the question was in play |
| **temporal clause** | *avant que, après que, depuis que, lorsque, quand* | *Après qu'il est parti, …* | he left |
| **cleft** | *C'est … qui/que* | *C'est Pierre qui a cassé le vase.* | someone broke the vase |
| **pseudo-cleft** | *Ce qui … c'est …* | *Ce que je veux, c'est un café.* | the speaker wants something |
| **wh-question** | *qui, quand, où, pourquoi, comment* | *Pourquoi est-il parti ?* | he left |
| **comparative, superlative** |  | *Il est plus grand que Paul.* | Paul has a size |
| **counterfactual** | *si* + imperfect / pluperfect | *Si j'avais su, je ne serais pas venu.* | I did not know |
| **focus particles** | *seulement, ne … que, uniquement, même, surtout, notamment* | *Seul Pierre est venu.* | someone else might have come |
| **adjectival and relative** | non-restrictive relatives, appositions | *Pierre, qui est médecin, …* | Pierre is a doctor |
| **expressive** | *quel* (exclamative), *voilà que* | *Quel imbécile !* | there is an idiot |

The **projection** behaviour of the presuppositions is what separates them from entailments (below).

## 6. Behaviour under negation, questions and embedding

A presupposition survives when the sentence is **negated**, **questioned**, put in the **antecedent of a conditional** or under a **modal**: the family of sentences.

|  | sentence | what remains presupposed |
| --- | --- | --- |
| affirmative | *Il a arrêté de fumer.* | he smoked |
| negated | *Il n'a pas arrêté de fumer.* | he smoked |
| question | *A-t-il arrêté de fumer ?* | he smoked |
| conditional | *S'il a arrêté de fumer, il ira mieux.* | he smoked |
| modal | *Il a peut-être arrêté de fumer.* | he smoked |

An entailment (*Il a tué le chat* entails *Le chat est mort*) does not survive negation. The test applies to all the triggers of the table of section 5: *Il ne regrette pas que tu sois parti*, *Regrette-t-il que tu sois parti ?*, *S'il regrette que tu sois parti, …* all presuppose that you left.

The presupposition can be **filtered** or **blocked** by the context:

- ***Si* + the presupposition**: *Si Pierre a un frère, son frère est médecin* — the presupposition of the possessive (that Pierre has a brother) is satisfied by the *si* clause.
- **Conjunction**: *Pierre a un frère, et son frère est médecin.*
- **Disjunction**: *Soit Pierre n'a pas de frère, soit son frère est médecin.*
- **Attitude verbs** shift the presupposition to the believer: *Marie croit que Pierre a arrêté de fumer* presupposes that Marie believes he smoked, not that he did.

When a presupposition is **not** in the common ground, the hearer usually **accommodates** it: *Je suis arrivé en retard parce que ma voiture est en panne* introduces the car as given even if the hearer did not know it. Accommodation is the way presupposition is used to carry new information as though it were old; it is also, as the next section shows, a device of persuasion and manipulation.

## 7. *Présupposé* and *sous-entendu*: the French tradition

French linguistics, following Ducrot (1972, *Dire et ne pas dire*), distinguishes two kinds of implicit content:

|  | *présupposé* | *sous-entendu* |
| --- | --- | --- |
| what it is | content carried by the linguistic form of the sentence, taken for granted | content the hearer infers from the context and the speaker's choice |
| where it comes from | the words and constructions (the triggers of §5) | the circumstances of utterance |
| the speaker's responsibility | the speaker has said it, in a way that cannot easily be disowned or contested | the speaker can disown it (*Je n'ai pas dit ça*) |
| English analogue | presupposition | conversational implicature |
| example | *Il a cessé de fumer* (he smoked) | *Il est tard* (let's go; I'm tired) |

The French literature stresses the **argumentative and interactional** use of the presupposition, the point that Garassino and colleagues (2024, `garassino-2024-politicians-vs-chatgpt-study-presuppositions`) state with reference to Ducrot (1972; 1984): a presupposition is a linguistic act whose function is to restrain the speaker's possibilities of orienting the subsequent discourse; it sets the frame of the exchange and forces the hearer to accept it or to challenge it explicitly. To challenge a presupposition one must break the flow (*Attendez, il n'a jamais fumé !*), which is costly, while to challenge an assertion one only has to deny it. The presupposition thus passes information in a form that is hard to contest, which explains its use in advertising and politics.

## 8. Metalinguistic negation and cancellation

The standard negation, *ne … pas*, denies the proposition. **Metalinguistic negation** denies something else about the utterance: an implicature, a presupposition, a register, the pronunciation. The French examples:

| denies | example |
| --- | --- |
| an implicature | *Il n'est pas content, il est ravi.* (denies "just content") |
| a presupposition | *Le roi de France n'est pas chauve : il n'y a pas de roi de France.* |
| a register | *Il n'a pas « bagnolé », il a conduit sa voiture.* |
| a form | *Il ne s'appelle pas Jean, mais « Jehan ».* |

The pattern is a negation followed by a correction (*mais*, *ou plutôt*, a comma, a pause) with a typical intonation. Blochowiak and Grisot (2018, `blochowiak-2018-pragmatics-descriptive-metalinguistic-negation-experimental`) report experiments with French speakers on the pragmatics of descriptive and metalinguistic negation: the long-debated question is whether the second is a separate (ambiguous) use of the negation or the same truth-functional negation applied after pragmatic enrichment. The debate bears on how a presupposition-aware system should treat *ne … pas*: the negation of a sentence can cancel its presupposition when it is metalinguistic, and a parser has only the correction (*mais il n'y a pas de roi de France*) to go by.

## 9. Clefts and focus

A **cleft** (*C'est … qui/que*) and a **pseudo-cleft** (*Ce qui/que … c'est …*) present part of the sentence as new (the focus) and the rest as given. *C'est Pierre qui a cassé le vase* presupposes that someone broke the vase and says that it was Pierre; it carries **exhaustivity**, the implication that only Pierre did it. The exhaustivity is cancellable (*C'est Pierre qui l'a cassé, avec Paul*), so it is an implicature or an inference of the structure, not an entailment; the debate about its status (assertion, presupposition, implicature) is wide. Subject focus is the subject of a study of French and Spanish (Cassara 2026, `cassara-2026-subject-focus-french-spanish`, CC BY 4.0, a book whose text we hold but did not read for this chapter).

*Seul*, *seulement*, *ne … que*, *uniquement* mark exhaustivity directly. *Seul Pierre est venu.* asserts that Pierre came and that no one else did (the second is the exclusive content), and presupposes (on one analysis) that Pierre came.

The structure of the French sentence leaves the focus to word order and intonation more than English does ([chapter 29](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/)): the dislocation *Pierre, il est venu* presents *Pierre* as a topic, the cleft presents it as a focus, the dislocation and the cleft can be combined (*Pierre, c'est lui qui l'a fait*). The `dislocated` relations and the `expl:subj` of the clefts are the cues in the tree.

## 10. Triggers in the treebanks

String counts in the sentence texts of the UD 2.18 treebanks (2026-11-06; GSD, ParisStories, Rhapsodie, Sequoia; token totals 400 385, 42 789, 44 234, 70 545). The strings count words and phrases, not readings: *toujours* is a continuation word and also "always", *même* is "even" and "same", *devenir* contains *venir*-forms that are not iterative; the counts show what a word-list detector would see.

| trigger or scale item | GSD | ParisStories | Rhapsodie | Sequoia |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *encore* | 206 | 13 | 28 | 33 |
| *pas encore* | 19 | 2 | 0 | 5 |
| *déjà* | 102 | 46 | 35 | 26 |
| *toujours* | 143 | 30 | 59 | 15 |
| *ne … plus* (string) | 90 | 6 | 15 | 10 |
| *de nouveau / à nouveau* | 50 | 1 | 7 | 7 |
| *aussi* | 409 | 49 | 57 | 68 |
| *également* | 321 | 0 | 32 | 69 |
| *non plus* | 12 | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| *même* | 556 | 130 | 106 | 67 |
| *seulement* | 74 | 3 | 5 | 17 |
| *ne … que* (string) | 106 | 0 | 5 | 18 |
| *cesser de* and forms | 20 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| *arrêter de* and forms | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| *commencer à* and forms | 35 | 21 | 4 | 0 |
| *continuer à/de* and forms | 13 | 1 | 1 | 6 |
| *devenir* and forms | 214 | 6 | 14 | 13 |
| *savoir que* and forms | 7 | 14 | 7 | 4 |
| *regretter* and forms | 7 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| *se rendre compte* and forms | 5 | 10 | 2 | 0 |
| *réussir à* and forms | 23 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| *avant que / avant de* | 73 | 1 | 3 | 19 |
| *après que / après avoir* | 77 | 0 | 3 | 9 |
| *c'est … qui/que* (cleft, string) | 149 | 54 | 85 | 22 |
| *ce qui/que … c'est* (pseudo-cleft, string) | 10 | 12 | 13 | 1 |
| *certains / certaines* | 181 | 3 | 11 | 31 |
| *quelques* | 154 | 13 | 8 | 35 |
| *plusieurs* | 264 | 5 | 8 | 43 |
| *la plupart* | 62 | 2 | 2 | 9 |
| *tous / toutes* | 390 | 87 | 69 | 92 |
| *beaucoup* | 118 | 43 | 56 | 15 |
| *souvent* | 121 | 14 | 12 | 11 |
| *parfois / quelquefois* | 68 | 4 | 7 | 6 |
| *jamais* | 90 | 34 | 27 | 12 |
| *au moins* | 34 | 9 | 5 | 29 |
| *mais* | 833 | 293 | 230 | 100 |
| *pourtant* | 30 | 4 | 3 | 4 |
| *d'ailleurs* | 58 | 6 | 16 | 7 |
| *quand même* | 6 | 45 | 44 | 1 |

Three observations. First, the written corpus is rich in the **scalar quantifiers** (*certains*, *plusieurs*, *quelques*, *la plupart*: 661 in 400 k words of GSD, 1.65 per thousand tokens) and the spoken ones are not (23 in the 43 k of ParisStories and 29 in the 44 k of Rhapsodie, about 0.5 to 0.7 per thousand), where the scalar items are *beaucoup*, *peu*, *tout* and *jamais*. Second, **clefts** are far more frequent in speech: 149 *c'est … qui/que* strings in GSD (3.7 per 10 000 tokens), 54 in ParisStories (12.6) and 85 in Rhapsodie (19.2), and so are far more frequent in speech; the string includes many non-clefts (*c'est une question que …*), so the counts are an upper bound. Third, the **conventional implicature of concession** is divided by register: *pourtant* and *d'ailleurs* are written words (30 and 58 in GSD, 4 and 6 in ParisStories) while *quand même* is spoken (6 in GSD against 45 and 44 in the spoken ones).

An exact count of presupposition triggers needs the readings, and the French treebanks have no annotation for them. The nearest annotation is the dependency itself: a change-of-state verb is a verb with a given lemma, a definite description is a `det` of the type `Definite=Def` on a noun, a factive complement is a `ccomp` of a factive lemma, a cleft is an `expl:subj` *ce* with a `acl:relcl` or a relative clause introduced by *qui/que* ([chapter 25](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/25-relative-clauses/)). In the trees, 931 `expl:subj` occur in GSD, 314 in ParisStories and 425 in Rhapsodie, of which *il* is 611, 249 and 286 and *ce* 220, 34 and 83 (2026-11-06): the expletive *ce* of *c'est* constructions is 36% as frequent as expletive *il* in GSD, 14% in ParisStories and 29% in Rhapsodie.

## 11. What the research has found

**Presupposition in political communication.** Garassino, Masia, Brocca and Delorme Benites (2024, `garassino-2024-politicians-vs-chatgpt-study-presuppositions`, CC BY 4.0) compared the speeches of French and Italian politicians with texts that ChatGPT 3.5 generated for the same issues (immigration, the European Union), on a corpus (IMPAQTS) annotated for presupposition triggers and their discourse functions. Their results: on average the generated texts contain **more questionable presuppositions** (presuppositions that present as given a content that is not shared and not obviously true) than the politicians' texts; the two most frequent trigger types, **change-of-state verbs** and **definite descriptions**, together make up about 70% of all triggers in the politicians' texts and 80% in the generated ones; definite descriptions are the commonest trigger in the politicians' speeches and change-of-state verbs in the generated ones (a significant difference, χ² = 16.13, df = 1, p < .0001, Phi = .25); the other types (factives, relative clauses, adjectives, adverbs, clefts) are rare. The authors relate the tendency to a feature of the generated text: verbose and repetitive slogans made of change-of-state verbs (for example *bâtir*, which appears in the texts of all four politicians, and *protéger*) that presuppose a state of affairs the text does not argue for. The finding for a description of French is that the two triggers on which the whole of the political presupposition rests are the most easily detectable by word lists and dependency relations (a definite description, a change-of-state verb).

**Metalinguistic negation** (Blochowiak & Grisot 2018): see section 8.

**Indirect answers** (Müller & Plank 2024): see section 3.1.

**Winograd schemas** (Amsili & Seminck 2017; Wang, Seminck & Amsili 2022; `amsili-2017-google-proof-collection-french-winograd`, `wang-2022-investigating-associative-switchable-negatable-winograd`): pronoun-resolution problems that require world knowledge, of which section 4 of [chapter 35](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/35-reference-and-coreference/) says more. They are relevant here because resolving the pronoun is an inference of the type of an implicature (a context-dependent conclusion by reasoning about what the speaker could mean).

**Gaps.** We hold no open French corpus annotated for scalar implicature, for presupposition outside the political speeches, or for conventional implicature. The French experimental literature on scalar implicature (for example on *certains*, *ou*, *quelques*) exists in journals that we do not hold in open form.

## How Mova handles it

**In English.** Mova's inference module (`prag/src/infer.rs`; run with `prag infer <en model> "<text>"`) computes, deterministically and with an explanation for each result:

- **scalar implicatures** from a table of scales (`SCALES`; after the Quantity axiom of Tatu and Moldovan 2012 and the Horn scales): a weaker item implicates that the stronger ones do not hold, except under negation, when a stronger item is also in the sentence, or when the speaker cancels it (*if not all*, *in fact all*, *or even*);
- **presuppositions of triggers** (`presuppositions`; after Cianflone et al. 2018 for the adverbs): *again, still, also, too, stop, quit, continue, keep, know, realize, regret, forget that*; a presupposition is *licensed* when the earlier text, up to 50 tokens back, has the same predicate, and *accommodated* otherwise, with the explanation saying which;
- **Quality and Manner** (`maxims`), with the question and the reordering axioms.

A separate module (`prag/src/rsa.rs`) runs the Rational Speech Acts recursion exactly, with integer weights, on small closed games supplied by hand.

**In French, none of this runs.** What is true on 2026-11-06:

- Every list is English: the scales in `SCALES`, the trigger lemmas in `presuppositions`, the cancellation phrases. A French sentence goes through the English tree parser after `en xpos-fill` and its lemmas (*cesser*, *arrêter*, *encore*, *certains*) match nothing.
- The trees carry what French needs where the treebanks have it: `Definite=Def` on determiners, the lemma of the verb, the `expl:subj` of clefts, `ccomp` of factives, `advcl` of *avant que* and *après que*, `Mood=Sub` on the embedded verb. After `xpos-fill` the mood is lost in the tag but not in the FEATS ([chapter 13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/13-verbs/)); a French reader of the subjunctive trigger must take it from the FEATS.
- The English module has **no projection logic** (holes, plugs, filters): a trigger fires wherever the parser shows it with the right relation. That limit carries over, and French adds the *si* filter of section 6 and the metalinguistic negation of section 8, which are the cases where the limit matters.
- The English module prints its inferences and does not store them in frames or in the world; the same would hold for a French version.

**What is being built.** A French pragmatics layer is being built for the Eel (round kind `prag-fr` in `tools/eel/src/schedule.rs` and `tools/eel/src/native.rs`, on the branch under development on 2026-11-06; [chapter 30](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/30-pragmatics-overview/), §9.4). Its executable is still being written and has no inference component; nothing of this chapter is labelled or measured for French. The planned language-independent meta-pragmatics is where the kinds belong — scalar implicature over an ordered scale, the presupposition of iteration, of continuation, of factivity, of existence — while the French layer supplies the items (*certains* < *tous*, *encore*, *ne … plus*, *regretter que*, the definite article) and the French conditions (the *si* filter, the subjunctive after factive emotive verbs). No such schema exists in code yet.

**What is needed, in order.** (1) A French scale table (section 2) and a French trigger table (section 5) as data in the form `SCALES` and the trigger list already have, with the French cancellation phrases (*voire*, *même*, *en fait*, *si ce n'est tous*, *ou plutôt*). (2) The French scalar-item lemmas matched by lemma and part of speech, so that *tous* as a determiner and as a pronoun, or *même* as "even" and as "same", are separated; the counts of section 10 show how ambiguous the strings are. (3) The conventional implicatures of section 4 as a closed list of connectives with their relation, which is the content of the LEX-CONN-type resource of [chapter 36](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/36-discourse-relations/). (4) A gold set: a small check suite in the style used for English can be written for French by hand; there is no open French gold for implicature or presupposition detection to measure against, and the political corpus of Garassino et al. is not distributed with the paper.

## Sources

- Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation; Horn, L. R. 1972, 1989 (scales); Ducrot, O. 1972. *Dire et ne pas dire*; Frank, M. C., Goodman, N. D. 2012. Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games. Cited as background and as cited in the papers below; not held.
- Garassino, D., Masia, V., Brocca, N., Delorme Benites, A. 2024. Politicians vs ChatGPT. A study of presuppositions in French and Italian political communication. AI-Linguistica 1(1). `garassino-2024-politicians-vs-chatgpt-study-presuppositions` (CC BY 4.0).
- Blochowiak, J., Grisot, C. 2018. The pragmatics of descriptive and metalinguistic negation: experimental data from French. Glossa 3(1). `blochowiak-2018-pragmatics-descriptive-metalinguistic-negation-experimental` (CC BY 4.0).
- Müller, C., Plank, B. 2024. IndirectQA. `muller-2024-indirectqa-understanding-indirect-answers-implicit` (CC BY-NC 4.0: informs only, not quoted).
- Cassara, M. 2026. Subject focus in French and Spanish (Language Science Press). `cassara-2026-subject-focus-french-spanish` (CC BY 4.0).
- Amsili, P., Seminck, O. 2017. A Google-proof collection of French Winograd schemas. `amsili-2017-google-proof-collection-french-winograd`; Wang, X., Seminck, O., Amsili, P. 2022. `wang-2022-investigating-associative-switchable-negatable-winograd` (both CC BY 4.0).
- UD French GSD, ParisStories, Rhapsodie (CC BY-SA 4.0), Sequoia (LGPL-LR); string counts of 2026-11-06 over the `# text` lines, all splits together; relation counts over the CoNLL-U files.
- Mova code: `prag/src/infer.rs`, `prag/src/rsa.rs`; the [English chapter 33](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/33-implicature-and-presupposition/).
- [← previous 32. Politeness and hedging](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/32-politeness-and-hedging/)
- [next → 34. Irony and figurative language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/34-irony-and-figurative-language/)
- [↑ back to Modern Standard French (fr) — a reference manual for Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/)