Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Attitude reports 135
believe, but not, or not necessarily, the other way round. It is evident that
the regularity expressed by the i-principle has something to do with this
asymmetry, although it remains to be seen what exactly is the nature of the
connection.
The problem with (1) and many other attitude ascriptions, is that they may
reasonably be taken to corroborate both the i-principle and the e-principle.
We would normally infer from an utterance of (1) that Louise has a niece and
that she believes that she has one -— or, to put it otherwise, presuppositions
that are triggered in the scope of an attitude verb may give rise to a two-sided
reading, which is internal as well as external. 1 Such two-sided readings do
not always come about, of course. In a situation in which Louise doesn't
know that she has a niece, but is nonetheless acquainted with her niece in
some other way, a merely external reading of (1) would be called for; whereas
in a context in which Louise mistakenly believes that she has a niece, a
strictly internal reading would be achieved. But often a two-sided reading
will be the most natural one.
It may be argued that both the internal and the external halves of these
two-sided interpretations are of a presuppositional nature. First, it is clear
that both the inference that Louise has a niece and the inference that she
believes that she has a niece can be traced back to the definite noun phrase
her niece. Secondly, both inferences appear to display the projection
behaviour that is the hallmark of presuppositions.
(5) Maybe Louise doesn't believe that her niece lives in Leeds.
Here (1) is embedded within the scope of a modal and a negation operator,
and as one would expect on the basis of the e-principle, it follows from (5)
that Louise has a niece, while the i-principle correctly predicts that an
utterance of this sentence would normally imply that Louise believes that
she has a niece.
In the light of these observations, it may seem attractive to take the
position that both the i-principle and the e-principle are correct. Things are
not as simple as that, however. Suppose that we extend our DRS language in
such a way that representations like the following are well formed:
(6) [: Louise believes: [K: [x: x is Louise's niece, x lives in Leeds]]
This is intended as a nearly completed representation of (1), in which only
one presupposition remains to be dealt with, i.e. that Louise has a niece. The
precise semantics of conditions of the form 'u believes: 'If' xj/' will be left open
1 Loar (1972) may have been the first one to observe two-sided readings, but his remarks are
restricted to definite NPs. That other presupposition inducers can have such readings, too, was
recognized, either implicitly or explicitly, by Fauconnier (1985), van der Sandt (1988), Heim
(1992), Kay (1992), and Zeevat (1992).