Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

176 Presuppositions and Pronouns
will see however that Roberts's analysis of modal subordination does not fit
very comfortably with the fact that modal subordination occurs with
presuppositions in general, and not just with the presuppositions triggered
by pronouns. On the other hand, I will argue that Roberts overextends the
notion of modal subordination in certain ways, for example because she uses
it for analysing disjunctions.
Roberts's theory is discussed and criticized in the first section of this
chapter, which also serves to present some of the puzzles concerning modal
subordination (§ 6.1). In the subsequent sections I present an alternative
account, which is much in the spirit of Roberts's proposal (§§ 6.2 and 6.3). In
fact, I almost completely agree with the informal account of modal
subordination that Roberts offers. The principal ingredient that is lacking
from her account, in my opinion, is the idea that modal expressions are
presupposition inducers. Once this element is put into place, modal
subordination is automatically accounted for by the binding theory. This
analysis of modals, which is a straightforward extension of the theory
proposed in the previous chapter, diverges considerably from the letter of
Roberts's proposal, though. In particular, it will turn out that modal
subordination can be explained without resorting to the extremely powerful
mechanism of 'antecedent accommodation' which is crucial to Roberts's
theory, but which is also its weak spot, as I will argue. My account of modal
subordination applies to conditional sentences, too, which are the subject of
§ 6.4. In the course of this chapter it will turn out that 'modal subordination'
is actually a misleading term, because the same phenomenon can be
observed in attitude reports (as we have seen in the preceding chapter), and
with all sorts of quantifier expressions. By way of summing-up, the last
section documents this pervasive pattern (§ 6.5).
6.1 Modal subordination
Consider the following example:
(2) A thief might break into the house. He might take the silver.
The most natural reading of (2) is the one on which the modal in the first
sentence takes wide scope with respect to a thief, so we obtain a reading for
the discourse as a whole which may be paraphrased as follows: 'It might
happen that a thief broke into the house and that this thief took the silver.' It
is the programme of this chapter to account for this intuition and to explain
how it can be that the personal pronoun in the second sentence is
anaphorically dependent upon the indefinite in the first.
Let me start by briefly considering two straw attempts at executing this
programme, just to get them out of the way. First, it it might be thought that (2)