Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

50 Presuppositions and Pronouns
It will be evident, I trust, that there are significant parallels between the
anaphora and the presupposition cases. Van der Sandt's explanation for
these parallels is there aren't really two phenomena to begin with: anaphora
is a species of presupposition. 4 In the following pages I will outline how this
hypothesis can be fleshed out so as to account for the more straightforward
cases. The less straightforward ones involving modals and attitude contexts
will be addressed in later chapters.
Van der Sandt's theory is an extension of DRT, and consists of three
principal claims. The first of these is that anaphora is a species of
presupposition, and that the standard presupposition-inducing expressions
(such as definite NPs, factives, aspectual verbs, and so on) differ from
pronominal anaphors mainly in that they possess a richer semantic content.
This difference explains why the standard presupposition inducers, unlike
anaphoric pronouns, may be interpreted by way of accommodation, which is
the second key notion in the theory. Finally, van der Sandt assumes that the
process of accommodation is subject to certain constraints.
Formulated in procedural terms, van der Sandt's theory predicts that if an
utterance contains a presupposition-inducing element, the hearer will
initially attempt to bind the presupposition to a suitable antecedent, just as
he would try to bind an ordinary anaphor. If the presupposition cannot be so
bound, it will be accommodated, i.e. it will be inserted in some accessible
DRS. In general the number of positions at which a presupposition may be
accommodated is greater than one, and van der Sandt proposes that the
choice between these alternative positions is restricted by general constraints
on the pragmatic acceptability of DRSs.
Before we have a closer look at this theory, I want to settle some
terminological matters. I will call lexical expressions or syntactic
constructions that give rise to presuppositions 'presupposition inducers' or
'presupposition triggers', and say that, for example, a definite NP 'induces'
or 'triggers' a presupposition. I shall do my best to restrict my use of the term
'presupposition' to pieces of semantic information that are triggered by
presupposition inducers in what I will call the 'home DRS' of the
presupposition. Thus, if a definite NP occurs in the consequent of a
conditional, the home DRS of the presupposition triggered by the NP will be
the DRS that corresponds to the consequent of the conditional. This is the
part of my terminology that I shall try to be strict about. No such attempts
will be made regarding the verb 'to presuppose'. Following Stalnaker, I
consider presupposing to be something speakers do, but this will not deter
4
4 Actually, van der Sandt's (1992) claim is that presuppositions are anaphors, but this is just a
terminological difference. I prefer to reserve the term 'anaphora' for referring to a subclass of
presuppositions, and associate it with descriptive poverty and binding to discourse entities
currently in focus. In van der Sandt's vocabulary, the term appears to have lost such
connotations. See § 2.5 for further discussion.