Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

CHAPTER 2
The binding theory
Although discourse representation theory aspires to be a general theory of
interpretation, its main applications have been in the areas of anaphoric and
temporal reference. It is in particular the first area that I am interested in,
because I maintain, following van der Sandt, that the DRT account of
anaphora can be generalized to a theory of presupposition projection.
In this chapter, I present a theory of presupposition projection which is an
extension of DRT, and therefore I start off with a brief outline of the DRT
framework (§ 2.1). In the next two sections, it is shown how DRT can be
extended to a theory of presupposition projection (§§ 2.2 and 2.3). The result
of this extension will be the binding theory, which is so-called because it
views presuppositions as elements that want to be bound in more or less the
same sense in which anaphoric elements want to be bound. These two
sections are the centrepiece of this book, for although the theory presented
there will be refined in the second half of this chapter, they introduce the
main ingredients for my account of presupposition projection in intensional
contexts (Chapters 5 and 6), and my analysis of names (Chapter 7). Indeed,
the binding theory as presented here will not be modified in later chapters, as
I will argue that, together with independently motivated treatments of modal
expressions and attitude verbs, it explains the behaviour of presuppositions
in modal contexts and attitude reports. Nor will my theory of names require
any modifications or extensions of the binding theory as presented in this
chapter. Having illustrated and refined the theory with the help of a few
small case studies in § 2.4, the chapter closes with some further remarks on
the key concepts of the binding theory, and their relation to the traditional
notion of anaphora.
2.1 Discourse representation theory
As its name already indicates, discourse representation theory is concerned
with the interpretation of discourses, not just sentences. 1 As a discourse
1 DRTwas originally proposed by Kamp (1981). What I will sometimes refer to as the standard
version of the theory is Kamp and Reyle's (1993).
PRESUPPOSITIONS AND PRONOUNS, Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 3
B. Geurts - © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved