Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Presupposition 19
pizzeria in the Vatican in (36c) does not merely convey that there is pizzeria
in the Vatican; it is an instruction to the hearer to retrieve (his representation
of) the said restaurant. Anaphoric pronouns, on this view, are just
semantically attenuate presuppositional expressions, and the theory of
anaphora is just one of the departments of the theory of presupposition. In a
nutshell, this is the binding theory of presupposition.
1.3 Presuppositions vs. implicatures
When taken at face value, presuppositions appear to be defeasible
inferences. By definition, presuppositions are normally impervious to any
form of embedding, and will be suppressed under special circumstances
only. We have seen that this impression is actually misleading, because in
reality presuppositions are never cancelled; they may be intercepted in an
intermediate context, but they never disappear altogether. However, let us
ignore this for a while, and suppose that presuppositions are cancellable, as
they seem to be. If this is so, it is something presuppositions have in
common with conversational implicatures, and it is not to be wondered that
many people have considered the possibility of explaining presuppositions
along Gricean lines. One of the first authors to explore this possibility was
Grice himself, although, characteristically, Grice does not align himself with
the position (as he puts it) that presuppositions are implicatures (Grice
1981). He entertains the hypothesis that some alleged instances of
presupposition might be partly explained in terms of implicature, but also
considers the possibility that presupposition might be partly explained in
terms of scope. In short, Grice doesn't risk taking a stance. Where Grice
feared to tread, others have been more daring. For instance, Atlas and
Levinson (1981) argue that the alleged presuppositions of it-clefts are in fact
conversational implicatures, and it has often been suggested that
definiteness and/or anaphora might somehow be analysed in terms of
implicature (see Levinson 1987, 1997, and Gundel et al. 1993).
In keeping with this trend, it has been claimed that there is such a thing as
a projection problem for conversational implicatures. This view is at the
heart of Gazdar's (1979) theory of 'implicature projection', and it is
enunciated quite explicitly by Atlas and Levinson, too:
The 'filtering' of implicata seems to occur in compound sentences
in the same way that filtering of presupposition occurs. (Atlas and
Levinson 1981: 5)
More recently, this claim was reiterated by Levinson (1997). To be sure, it is
not necessary for a would-be Gricean reductionist to accept this position, but