Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

4 Presuppositions and Pronouns
rule does not always hold. Structurally, (9b) is analogous to (9a), but whereas
the latter presupposes that Fred cheated at the exam, the former does not.
Similarly with the sentence pairs in (10) and (11). In (10) the wh-cleft triggers
the presupposition that Barney ate something (d. (cf. (4a)), but unlike the
structurally identical construction in (lOa), (l0a), (lOb) (l0b) does not seem to preserve
this presupposition. Finally, by uttering (lla) (11a) a speaker would normally
commit himself to the assumption that there is a pizzeria in the Vatican (cf. (d.
(6a)), but an utterance of (lIb) (l1b) would not entail this commitment.
It appears from these observations that presuppositions are normally
though not invariably inherited by the sentences in which they occur. This is
the so-called 'projection problem' for presuppositions:
To ask about projection is to ask about the conditions under which
presuppositions, no matter how initially triggered, are projected
from the clauses in which they are initially introduced to higherlevel
sentences in which these clauses are embedded. (Chierchia
and McConnell-Ginet 1990: 288)
This characterization of the problem, which is representative of what one
tends to find in the literature, should be used with caution, because it can be
misleading and, moreover, is strictly speaking incorrect, because
presuppositions are not carried by sentences. The subject of the verb
presuppose is a speaker or, perhaps, an utterance. As long as proper care is
higher-
exerted, it may be convenient to speak of presuppositional expressions as
inducing inferences which often do but sometimes do not 'project onto' the
sentences in which they occur. But it should be kept in mind that this is just a
manner of speaking: whenever it is said that sentence