Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

146 Presuppositions and Pronouns
b. There is an acquaintance relation D such that (i) John bore D
to my proof-reading, and (ii) John thought that the activity he
bore D to had stopped. (Heim 1992: 20S) 208)
In other words, Heim claims that, conceivably, (2Sa) (28a) may mean that '[...]
]
John thought of the activity of mine that was in fact a proof-reading, but that
he may not have recognized as such, that it had stopped.' (Heim 1992: 208) 20S)
Let us grant that a scenario can be constructed that enforces such a reading.
According to Heim, this reading can be obtained by construing proofreading,
in effect, as a wide-scope definite. But this cannot be right. Consider
the following minimal variant of (2Sa), (28a), for instance:
proof-
(29) John thought I had started proof-reading.
If Heim's analysis of (2Sa) (28a) were correct, then it should be possible to read
(29) as meaning that John thought of the activity of mine that was in fact a
proof-reading, but that he may not have recognized as such, that it had
started. If this makes sense at all, it is not the reading that we want to account
for. What needs to be explained, rather, is how (29) can, and typically will,
give rise to the inference that the speaker wasn't proof-reading before the
reference time, and it is by no means clear that this can be done by means of
de re construal.
In § 1.4 it was shown that scope taking and presupposition projection are
quite different things. If we say that an expression a takes wide scope, for
example, then we are speaking of a itself or a unit corresponding with a at
some level of analysis (such as a's counterpart at LF, or its denotation with
respect to a given model, or whatever). If, on the other hand, we say that a oc
triggers the presupposition that X, %, then % X is is a requirement that ex a imposes on
its context. So, whereas presupposition projection clearly is a pragmatic
affair, scope taking is primarily a grammatical phenomenon. At the end of
the day, it is this distinction which rules out the possibility of explaining
presupposition in terms of scope. But if that is impossible, then the same
applies for Heim's proposal that external readings of presuppositional
expressions might be accounted for in terms of de re construal. For even if
there is a difference between construing an expression de re and giving it
wide scope, the former surely involves something very much like the latter,
and no matter how exactly de re construals are to be accounted for, all the
problems discussed in Chapter 1 are problems for Heim's proposal, too.
Heim assumes that there are two mechanisms, so to speak, which can make
it seem as if a presuppositional expression has escaped from a local context.
On the one hand there is a presupposition-projection mechanism, which she
claims is derivable from a semantics in terms of context change, and on the
other hand there is the mechanism for generating de re construals. But
although it can hardly be denied that two such mechanisms exist, it is not at