Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

The binding theory 53
(35) a. [u, v, w: w = u, Fred u, rabbit v, u owns v, male w,
[: pink v] ~ => [: happy w]]
b. [u, v: Fred u, rabbit v, u owns v, male u,
[: pink v] ~ => [: happy u]]
This DRS does entail that Fred has a rabbit, and thus the theory accounts for
the observation that a speaker who volunteers (28b) commits himself to the
assumption that Fred has a rabbit.
If we imposed no further restrictions on the notion of accommodation we
would predict that, whenever a presupposition cannot be bound to a suitable
antecedent, it will be accommodated in the least embedded position, which
will always be in the principal DRS. (28c) serves to illustrate that this would
not always be correct. Let us start out from the following DRS for (28c), in
which the presupposition induced by the proper name has already been dealt
with:
(36) [x: Fred x,
[: o[y: -{y: rabbit y, x owns y]] v [z: rabbit z. z, x owns z. z, in-hiding z]]
Again, there is no suitable antecedent accessible to the presupposition,
which therefore will have to be accommodated. But this time, if we should
allow for accommodation in the principal DRS, we would get the wrong
result:
(37) [x, z: Fred x, rabbit z, x owns z,
[: o[y: -i[y: rabbit y, x owns y]] v [: in-hiding z]]
(37) entails that Fred owns a rabbit, which means that (28c) would
presuppose (28d), and that, we observed, is not the case.
Van der Sandt proposes to deal with this problem by assuming that
accommodation is subject to certain general constraints on interpretation.
He defines a notion of acceptability which rules out a DRS like (37) as being
pragmatically unacceptable, and stipulates that accommodation may not
result in an unacceptable DRS. In the case of (36) this forces the
presupposition to be accommodated in its home DRS rather than in the
principal DRS, and thus it is explained why (28c) doesn't presuppose that
(28d) is true.
In the following I will present an account of presupposition projection
which takes as its point of departure van der Sandt's thesis that
presupposition is to be analysed in terms of binding. I will accordingly call it
the 'binding theory' of presupposition. I am aware that syntacticians have
been using this term in a rather different sense, but their usage is so different
from mine that my appropriation of the term is unlikely to engender
confusion. There are three points at which my theory diverges from van der