Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

26 Presuppositions and Pronouns
something like the following: 'There were girls and teachers and many of the
former flirted with some of the latter.' If we want to account for this in terms
of scope, we will have to assume, in effect, that the nouns girls and teachers
can be given wide scope, along the following lines (here the capital variables
range over sets or groups):16
(54) [the X: girls X][the Y: teachers Y][many x: x E e X][some y: y E e Y]
(x flirted with y)
This proposal may be supported by the observation that, on this reading,
(53a) can be paraphrased with two explicit partitives:
(55) Many of the girls flirted with some of the teachers.
But now consider the following example:
(56) Everybody flirted with some teachers.
The most likely interpretation of this sentence is that everyone of a
contextually given group of individuals flirted with some teachers, so
everybody in (56) gets the same sort of interpretation as many girls in (53a),
and a Russellian analysis along the lines of (54) would have to look like this:
(57) [the X: persons X] [every x: x E e X][some y: teacher y]
(x flirted with y)
Even if it can be shown that this is an adequate representation of the
intended reading of (56), this analysis requires that everybody be
decomposed into two parts, one of which is to be given wide scope; i.e.
everybody must be read as 'every-one-of-the-people', and the second half of
this representation must be fronted. Needless to say, this is not a very
plausible procedure. I have no qualms about lexical decomposition per se,
but if we must assume that rules of interpretation can extract parts from the
semantic representation of a word, I begin to feel uncomfortable (ct. (cf. Geurts
1996b).
Let me try to bring the problem into clearer focus with the help of the
following examples.
(58) a. Perhaps Fred has stopped dating Betty, Betty.
b. Perhaps Fred has started dating Betty.
Normally speaking, someone who utters (58a) presupposes that Fred dated
Betty before a given time, while an utterance of (58b) will normally imply
that Fred did not date Mary before that time. If we want to represent these
16 16 The quantifier the employed in (54) is obviously not the same as the the defined denned in (50), which
will only deal with definite NPs in the singular. See Neale (1990) for a Russellian analysis of