Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

The satisfaction theory 95
condition that is not intuitively observable, I will call this the 'proviso
problem'.
The proviso problem arises because what is intuitively speaking
presupposed is often more (or stronger) than what is required to guarantee
local satisfaction of a given presupposition. The problem isn't restricted to
conjunctions but also turns up with conditionals, which isn't so remarkable
since conjunctions and conditionals share the same definedness conditions.
Thus, the theory predicts that (12a) presupposes that Fred has a wife, while
(12b) merely presupposes that he has a wife if he hates sonnets:
(12) a. If Fred's wife hates sonnets then his manager does so, too.
b. If Fred hates sonnets then his wife does so, too.
Again, although intuitively both sentences imply that Fred has a wife, the
satisfaction theory straightforwardly predicts this for (12a) but not for (12b),
which is predicted to presuppose merely that the conditional in (9b) is true.
In short, it turns out to be a characteristic of all versions of the satisfaction
theory that for a certain range of constructions they deliver predictions that
are too weak. This proviso problem arises, in particular, when a presupposition
is triggered in the consequent of a conditional or in the second
member of a conjunction that occurs in a non-entailed position, for example,
in the scope of a negation or a modal operator. The problem isn't restricted
to these environments, however. The local context in which a presupposition
X % arises is given by an expression of the form c[cp