Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

CHAPTER 6
Modals
As it stands, the binding theory does not account for (la), although it does
offer an explanation for (lb): (Ib):
(1) a. Maybe Barney owns a Chevrolet and maybe he keeps it
hidden somewhere.
b. Maybe Barney owns a Chevrolet and maybe he keeps his
Chevrolet hidden somewhere.
The presupposition triggered by his Chevrolet in (Ib) (lb) cannot be bound, and
will therefore have to be accommodated, and since global accommodation
would violate Gricean constraints on interpretation, it will be accommodated
locally. This procedure yields a reading that is intuitively correct but it does
not work for (la), because even if the presupposition triggered by the
pronoun could be accommodated, there is nothing to prevent global
accommodation in this case, and even if the presupposition were
accommodated locally, we would still not obtain the correct reading for this
sentence, which should come out equivalent to (Ib). (lb).
If the accommodation account does not work for (la), there is good reason
to suspect that it shouldn't apply to (Ib), (lb), either. This suspicion is
strengthened by the intuition that in (la) as well as in (Ib), (lb), the second modal
somehow picks up and extends the hypothetical context created by the first,
and that the reference marker introduced by the indefinite noun phrase in
the first conjunct should be accessible whenever this context is being
extended, which is what the second conjunct does. Many of the authors who
have discussed this type of example, beginning with Karttunen (1976),
appear to share this intuition, which implies that the personal pronoun it in
(la) and the definite noun phrase his Chevrolet in (Ib) (lb) are bound rather than
accommodated.
The phenomenon illustrated by (la) has come to be known under the
name of 'modal subordination', which was coined by Roberts (1987, 1989,
1996). Initially Roberts restricted the notion of modal subordination to
anaphoric pronouns, but as she observes in her 1996 paper, the same
phenomenon occurs with all sorts of presuppositional expressions, as (Ib) (lb)
illustrates (this type of example was discussed already by Gazdar 1979). We
PRESUPPOSITIONS AND PRONOUNS, Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 3
B. Geurts - © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved