Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

172 Presuppositions and Pronouns
This analysis shows how an anaphoric pronoun in a want context can pick up
its antecedent from a believe context. Similarly, in (72a) the presupposition
that Fred's wife is given to drink, which is triggered by the aspectual verb
stop, is bound in the belief context in the antecedent.
(72) a. If Fred believes that his wife has taken to drink again, then he
will want her to stop drinking.
b. If Fred's wife has taken to drink again, then he will want her to
stop drinking.
In (72b), on the other hand, the same presupposition is bound in the
antecedent of the conditional, and this is predicted, too, since a want context
is the same type of entity as a believe context, and we have seen already that
the theory allows presuppositions to escape from such contexts. By the same
token, it is predicted that, if a presupposition triggered in a want context
cannot be bound, it will be accommodated, which means, as a rule, that it is
accommodated globally. This is correct, too, as witness examples like the
following:
(73) Fred wants his wife to stop drinking.
Under normal circumstances, this will be taken to imply that, according to
the speaker, Fred's wife has been drinking, which is what I predict.
We have seen that Heim's theory cannot account for presupposition
filtering in want-want sequences (§ 5.2). Mine can. To To illustrate this, suppose
that the discourse in (71a) is is continued with an utterance of (74a). Our initial
DRS will then be as in (74b), which consists of (7lf) (71f) incremented with the
information furnished by the new sentence:
(74) a. And he (Kurt) wants to dedicate it (the book) to Professor
Muller. Mtiller.
b. [p,p',q',r,r': p', q/, X, r/:
K believes p & p', p' = p+[x: ghost x, x shadows K],
K prefers p
'/ q/, q', q' = p/+[y: p'+[y: book y, K writes y about x],
K considers r, r. K prefers r r', r' = r+[z;: r+[z: K dedicates z to PM]]
In (74a) the neuter pronoun in in the scope of want is is anaphoric on a book in
(71a). (74a) presupposes that there is a set of indexed worlds which is
compatible with the doxastic alternatives that are open to Kurt, and the DRS
in (74b) offers three possible antecedents for this presupposition. However,
there will be no suitable antecedent for it unless r picks up q', q/, which makes
available y as an antecedent for z. The binding theory predicts that the latter
alternative will be preferred, which yields the representation in (74c), or,
equivalently but slightly more succinctly, (74d):