Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

24 Presuppositions and Pronouns
1.4 Projection vs. scope
Informally, presuppositions may be described as interpretative elements that
prefer to take wide scope. This is a sloppy way of speaking because
presupposition projection has nothing to do with scope as grammarians
employ that notion. Presupposition projection and scope taking are
phenomena that must be clearly distinguished, although they interact in
various ways. In this section I will concentrate on the first point, and attempt
to show that the two phenomena are disjoint. I will touch only briefly on the
interaction between presupposition projection and the interpretation of
scope-bearing expressions, since this is one of the leitmotives of the second
half of this book.14
The idea that presuppositional data might at least partly be explained in
terms of scope has attracted a great many people. Most importantly,
adherents of Russell's analysis of definite descriptions (which, after some
wilderness years, seems to be enjoying a spectacular revival) in effect adopt
a scope analysis of what on the presuppositional view is just one of many
presupposition triggers. In comparison, treatments in terms of scope of other
presuppositional expressions are few and far between. Incidents that I know
of are a scope analysis offactive factive verbs proposed by Delacruz (1976), a similar
analysis considered by Grice (1981), and Heim's (1992) tentative suggestion
that aspectual verbs be treated in terms of scope.
To convey something of the attraction of this approach, let us quickly
recapitulate Russell's (1905) famous theory of descriptions, as applied to his
equally famous examples (49a, b).
(49) a. The King of France is bald.
b. The King of France is not bald.
Adopting a restricted-quantifier notation which I take to be selfexplanatory,
Russell's proposal is that the definite article is in fact a
self-
quantifier, which is defined as follows:
(50) [the x: Px] Qx =deJ = def [some x: Px](Qx & [all y: Py](x = y))
With the help of this quantifier, (49a) is analysed as follows:
14 14 Caveat: in this section I will use the notion of scope in the grammarian's sense. That is to say,
scope is something which scope-bearing expressions have, and the scope of an expression is
determined, roughly speaking, by moving it about at some level of analysis. Fairly
uncontroversial examples are quantifying determiners, negation, modals, etcetera. The claim
that presuppositions aren't scope-bearing elements in this sense does not to preclude the
possibility that they interact with scope-bearing elements in some way or other. (Cf. the
treatment of indefinites in D DRT.)