Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Attitude reports 147
all obvious that they both apply to presuppositional expressions. If
presuppositions already have a natural tendency to float up from embedded
positions anyway, why should they need help from a mechanism for de re
construal I take it that we should prefer a theory that is in a position to say
that de re interpretations of presuppositional expressions are the outcome of
the standard mechanisms of presupposition projection, and that a special
mechanism for de re construal is only required in exceptional cases, as with
marked indefinite noun phrases. Given the theory that I present below, all
typical de re construals fall out automatically as instances of presupposition
projection, and I take it that, ceteris paribus, this type of account is to be
preferred to Heim's. 'so 5
One final remark about Heim's calling upon a mechanism for de re
construal: it seems to me that in doing so she is pulling the rug from under
her own theory. If it is indeed the case that presuppositional expressions in
general can be construed as taking scope over the immediate contexts in
which they occur, it is unclear why an appeal to wide-scope readings should
be restricted to attitude contexts. Why not describe all presuppositional
phenomena in terms of scope For reasons discussed in § 1.4 this is not a
realistic option. It should be clear however that the manoeuvre which Heim
is contemplating is liable to backfire on her own theory.
To recapitulate: in the first half of this section I have argued that the
semantics which Heim provides for the verbs believe and want fails to
correctly predict the presuppositional properties of these verbs. This is not to
say that this semantics is wrong, for in fact I intend to adopt it myself, too.
But it is to say that, as in the case of the connectives, the projection profile of
an attitude verb does not follow from its meaning alone. In the second half
of this section I partly reviewed Heim's attempts to explain the fact that
presuppositions triggered in attitude contexts may receive a two-sided
interpretation. Since Heim's theory only accounts for the internal
component, she has to explain the two-sided reading on the basis of an
internal construal. I have argued against one of the two lines of argument
that Heim suggests for this job. Another line she tentatively pursues will be
discussed in § 5.6.
5.3 Belief in D DRT
My account of presuppositions in attitude contexts is similar to Heim's in a
number of ways, but crucially different in others, the most significant
5
5 It will have become clear in the meantime what led me to introduce the distinction between
internal and external construals of presuppositional expressions in addition to the de re/de dicto
distinction.