Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

The binding theory 85
(88) a. Did you know 1 }
> Wilma is pregnant again
b.
Isn't it a shame that
J
(88a) and (88b) presuppose the same thing, viz. that Wilma is pregnant again.
But obviously this presupposition is much more readily accommodated in
the former case than in the latter. Apparently, it is not just the content of a
presupposition that determines how easily the presupposition is
accommodated, and therefore van der Sandt's conjecture doesn't provide a
full explanation of why some presuppositions are harder to accommodate
than others. Unfortunately, I am still at a loss to see how a better explanation
might go.
lt It bears emphasizing that there are probably no triggering expressions
whose presuppositions must always be bound. We have seen that even
pronouns can be construed by way of accommodation, and if it can be
accommodated, chances that some other presuppositional expressions must
always be bound would appear to be remote. I know of just a single possible
exception to this claim. Inspired by Kripke's observations on too, as reported
by Soames (1989), a number of authors have proposed that too is inherently
anaphoric. According to Heim (1992), for example, too introduces an
anaphoric element which must be coindexed with a earlier expression. But it
is not true, as is often suggested, that too always requires an explicit
antecedent. The day after India detonated its first series of nuclear bombs, I
read a newspaper column that began as follows:
(89) We now know that India has nuclear arms, too.
Even in the absence of an antecedent expression it is reasonably clear what
the too refers to. At any rate, this sentence is fully acceptable, and although
it is a matter of debate whether this is an instance of accommodation or not,
it demonstrates that the presupposition triggered by too need not always be
given in the preceding discourse.