Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

54 Presuppositions and Pronouns
Sandt's. First, it features a binding mechanism for presuppositions that is
slightly different from the one proposed by van der Sandt. Secondly, it
assumes that the constraints which, according to van der Sandt, only restrict
the process of accommodation in fact restrict the binding interpretation of
presuppositions as well. In this respect the binding theory is more general
than van der Sandt's original proposal. Thirdly, and most importantly, the
binding theory differs from van der Sandt's with respect to the nature of
these constraints on presupposition projection (or, for him, accommodation).
I have shown elsewhere how the binding theory can be spelled out in a
fully explicit and rigorous manner (Geurts 1995), and I will not repeat that
exercise here, because I feel that in this particular case the dictum that God
is in the details does not apply. As a matter of fact, the details are tedious and
of little interest, and tend to deflect one's attention from more important
matters. For this reason, I will abstract away from some of the technicalities
that a more rigorous presentation would have to include. It is inevitable that
this will lead to some loss in precision, but I hope that this loss is redressed
by a gain in clarity.
The first thing to do is decide is how presuppositions are going to be
represented. Thus far I have marked presuppositions by underlining parts of
DRSs, and it is natural to assume that presuppositions are formally
represented by DRSs; in fact, I have already adopted this representation in
the foregoing. For example, the presupposition triggered in the second
disjunct in (36) would be [z: rabbit z, x has z]. There are two things to note
about this representation. First, as a rule the DRSs that represent
presuppositions will be not be proper DRSs, because they contain reference
markers that are free. The reason for this, of course, is that presupposition
and assertion are aspects of the content of an expression which are ususally
linked and cannot be neatly separated. Secondly, and more importantly, if
presuppositions are represented by DRSs it follows that their content is
merely existential, or descriptive; the semantic content of [z: rabbit z, x has z],
as determined by the semantics of the DRS language, is that there is an a such
that a is a rabbit and b owns a, where b is whatever individual x has been
assigned to. However, this should not be taken to imply that, according to the
binding theory, there are only existential presuppositions. On the contrary,
the theory claims that presuppositions are never merely existential; by
definition, a presupposition wants to be bound to an antecedent. It is just that
this 'definiteness' 'defmiteness' is not explicitly encoded in the content of a presupposition;
it is implied by the way presuppositions are handled by the theory's
construction rules.
Having decided that a presupposition will be represented by a DRS, we
must settle how it is to be linked to its home DRS, i.e. the DRS in which it is
triggered. The graphical representation that I have used (and will continue
to use) suggests that a presupposition is part of its home DRS. If we take this