Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

178 Presuppositions and Pronouns
breaks into the house and takes the silver, which is not what the second
sentence in (6) means. Rather, this sentence seems to say something like:'// 'If
a thief broke into the house, he would take the silver.'
It is a familiar observation that the meaning of a modal expression is
dependent on contextual factors. This context dependence is quite evident in
examples like the following:
(7) Your teeth might fall out.
In this example it is perfectly clear what kind of contextual information the
sentence requires, at least intuitively speaking: (7) means something like 'If
the circumstances were to be such and such, your teeth might fall out,' and
unless the context fixes what 'such and such' means, the sentence will be
unintelligible. Consequently, it is difficult to imagine a conversation opening
with an utterance of (7). If we put together this insight with the standard
construal of modals as quantifiers over possible worlds, we cannot but
conclude that the quantificational domain of a modal expression is restricted
by the context in which it occurs.1
1
This context dependence is Roberts's starting point. She observes that the
second modal in (6) tends to be read as a conditional whose antecedent
makes explicit the domain of the modal would. This is in conformity with
what we said in the preceding paragraph. What Roberts adds to this picture
is a mechanism that actually fills in the modal domain with material furnished
by the context. She calls this mechanism 'antecedent accommodation'.2 2 To
illustrate the workings of this mechanism, let (8) be the initial representation
of (6).
(8) [: O[x: thief x, break-in x], [...:...] ] n-> ~ [z: take-silver z]]
In this DRS the first sentence of (6) is represented as a simple possibility
statement. This is not to say that this sentence is not relativized to a modal
domain, but Roberts argues (1989: 698) that in this particular case the more
orthodox representation is adequate enough, and I shall assume for the time
being that she is right about this. The second sentence of (6) is represented
initially by a conditional whose antecedent has not yet been specified. The
connective 'O~' 'D->' is interpreted as a kind of conditional necessity, and its
interpretation makes the antecedent accessible to the consequent, as does
the ordinary DRT conditional. Now antecedent accommodation as
presented by Roberts fills in the antecedent of such a conditional, generally
by copying over information from that part of the DRS which represents the
immediately preceding discourse. In the example under discussion this
1
1 See Lewis (1979) and Kratzer (1981, 1991). The latter traces back the key observations to
C.S. Peirce.
2 In her 1996 article, Roberts presents this as an instance of local accommodation.