Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

28 Presuppositions and Pronouns
(62)) [most x: professor x][the x ] Y: Y Yare Coca Cola shares owned by x]
(x sold Y)
This mayor may not be a possible reading of (61a), but it certainly does not
represent the interpretation we want to have, since (61a) might be true, while
(62) would be false, if it weren't the case that most professors owned Coca
Cola shares. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for (61b, c).
These observations will suffice to discredit the notion that projection
phenomena can be accounted for in terms of scope. The reason for this is
that presupposition projection is a pragmatic phenomenon, whereas scope
taking is much more of a surface phenomenon. If we speak about an
expression ex a in terms of scope, we are referring to some a-sized unit, i.e. a
itself or some semantic entitity corresponding with a, such as a's oc's correlate at
LF or its interpretation in a given model. Although in some frameworks this
is only a metaphor, the guiding intuition is that a's scope is determined by
moving a about. If, on the other hand, we speak of a presupposition triggered
by ex, a, the metaphor is a completely different one, the idea being, rather, that
ex a requires us to check that some piece of information is given. This
distinction is perhaps most evident in expressions that have scope and trigger
presuppositions at the same time, like quantified NPs. An NP such as most
flowers, for example, takes scope with respect to other parts of the sentence
in which it occurs, while at the same time it triggers a presupposition, viz.
that some collection of flowers is contextually given.
The distinction between scope taking and presupposition projection is
obscured by the unfortunate circumstance that definite NPs, which have
always been the presuppositional expressions par excellence, happen to have
the special property that their descriptive contents coincide with the
presuppositions they induce. On the presuppositional account of definitess
that I advocate, a definite like the banana induces the presupposition that
some banana is given in the discourse context, and to a first approximation
that is all there is to say about the content of the banana. In general, the
content of an expression divides into an asserted and a presupposed part.
Definites are special in that the asserted part is empty. Consequently, unless
the presupposition triggered by a definite NP a is blocked, which will rarely
happen, it will seem as if a itself had taken wide scope, but this is an illusion,
as we have seen, because definite NPs aren't scope-bearing expressions.
Although it wasn't the main purpose of this section to argue against
Russell's theory of descriptions, I would like to conclude with a remark on
this theory's theory'S remarkable staying power. I will make my point by way of a
simile. My little niece has developed her own theory about the evolution of
forefingers.1 177 It is not a very complex theory; in fact I can summarize it in
seven words: forefingers have evolved for pointing at things. My niece
plural definites.