Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Presupposition 29
actually has a number of cogent arguments for this theory, but I will spare
you the details, because it will be evident already that it is not a good theory
at all. To begin with, it is strange that someone should even consider
developing such a theory in the first place. The evolution of fingers would be
a plausible subject; the evolution of forefingers is obviously not. And to make
things even worse, it turns out that there is no way this theory could be
extended so as to deal with the evolution of the other fingers. In brief:
without looking at the details we can tell beforehand that the theory is ad
hoc.
Russell's theory of descriptions is like my niece's theory about forefingers.
It confines its attention to a small portion of a broad class of related facts,
and this limitation is essential to whatever plausibility it may seem to have. If
my niece is convinced that her theory of forefingers is a sound one, it is only
because she blithely ignores the other fingers. Similarly, one can only defend
Russell's theory if he closes his eyes to the fact that definite NPs make up
only a fraction of a large complex of related phenomena, which the theory
cannot account for.
Of course, Russellians are bound to deny that there are non-trivial
similarities between definite NPs and factives, clefts, aspectual verbs, and so
on. A thoroughbred Russellian will rather say something like this:
A great range of disparate and unrelated phenomena has been
dubbed 'presuppositional' over the years, but [...] it seems highly
implausible that any theoretically important notion will do justice
to the full range of data that semanticists professing an interest in
'presupposition' seek to explain. (Neale 1990: 54)
I have been at pains to show that there is wide range of empirical phenomena
which cry out for a common explanation. This is what presupposition
theorists call the projection problem. One can of course choose to ignore this
problem or deny that it exists, as Neale does, but to do so is like saying that
there is no theoretically important notion that can explain why fingers have
evolved, because your niece has developed such a neat account of the
evolution of forefingers.
1.5 Where do they come from
In the following chapters the focus will on the problem of presupposition
projection, and it will be taken for granted that factive verbs presuppose
their clausal complements, that a definite NP of the form 'the N' triggers the
presupposition that some N is contextually given, and so on. In short, it will
be assumed that presuppositions are triggered by certain lexical items and