Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

18 Presuppositions and Pronouns
b. There were delegates from all provinces, and the Queen
talked with all {of them/delegates}.
c. There is a pizzeria in the Vatican, and {it/the pizzeria in the
Vatican} is closed.
In each of these examples, a pronoun and a presuppositional expression
perform the same duty: if the neuter pronoun in (36a) picks up an antecedent
introduced in the first conjunct, it is natural to suppose that the that-clause
does exactly the same thing. Analogous remarks apply to (36b) and (36c).
These observations bring out an aspect of presupposition that we haven't
touched upon so far, because it doesn't figure explicitly in Stalnaker's
writings. 10 We have said that if a speaker presupposes that %, X, he takes it for
granted that X. %. This is not quite correct, however, or at any rate it is
incomplete. A presupposition is not just something that is taken to be true in
the given context; it is something that is retrieved from the context. The
distinction is subtle but consequential. It is perhaps easiest observed in
definite NPs. We have said, as is common in the presupposition literature,
that a definite NP of the form 'the N' triggers the presupposition that there
is an N. (36c) shows that this is not all, and that it is better to say that the
function of such an NP is to retrieve an N from the current context. Similarly,
it is true that the quantified NP all delegates in (36b) requires that there be
delegates, but this is not enough to do justice to the presuppositional
requirements of this NP. Rather, what we should say is that the
presuppositional function of this NP is to retrieve from the context some set
of delegates. Another case in which the distinction is especially vivid are the
presuppositions triggered by focus particles such as too:
(37) I am hungry, too.
With focus on the subject term, the particle too triggers the presupposition
that there are persons other than the speaker who are hungry. But this much
can be taken for granted in just about any context, and it is clear that (37) can
only be used in contexts in which it is clear whom the speaker has in mind,
for example when someone else has previously uttered the same sentence
without the too.
The pronoun it in (36c) does not merely convey that this statement is about
a non-human individual; it is an instruction to the hearer to retrieve (his
representation of) the individual in question. Likewise, the definite NP the
10 10 Which is not to say that it is inconsistent with Stalnaker's views. If I were bent on proving that
Stalnaker's work prefigures every major aspect of the theory that I am going to defend, I would
certainly point to some of his remarks about pronouns, which show that he views anaphors as
presupposition-inducing expressions in some sense (cf. Stalnaker 1973: 449, 454). But the sober
truth is that nothing in Stalnaker's writings indicates a clear awareness of the intimate
relationship between presupposition and anaphora.