Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

174 Presuppositions and Pronouns
(76) a. Fred will be tripped by somebody, and he wants it to be
Barney. Barney, (cf. (64))
b. It is raining, and Fred wants it to stop. (cf. (65))
(77) Wilma wants a boy scout to make love to her. (cf. (66))
In (76a), the pronoun it occurs in the context created by 'Fred wants...', .', and
resolving this pronoun is not in itself sufficient to secure the inference that,
according to the speaker, Fred believes that someone tripped him. But
clearly this is something we would normally infer from an utterance of
(76a).The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for (76b). Similarly, even if the
indefinite in (77) is construed de re and given wide scope, we would normally
infer that Mary believes of the individual with whom she wants to engage in
amorous transactions that he is a boy scout. In either case importation
appears to be called for, and thus these observations provide independent
support for the sort of inference that is needed to round out our
presuppositional analysis of examples like (75a).