Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

58 Presuppositions and Pronouns
always, yield stronger readings than accommodation in an embedding
position. I find it doubtful, however, that hearers generally try to make their
interpretations as strong as possible, and therefore I don't see that principle
(C) can be motivated solely on this basis. It seems to me that this preference
should be explained in terms of relevance rather than quantity (to adopt the
Gricean jargon for the occasion). Consider the following example:
(43) a. Fred didn't bring his wife.
b. [x, y: Fred x, y is x's wife, -{ ->[: x brought y]]
c. [x, y: Fred x, .[y: -i[y: y is x's wife, x brought y]]
(43a) may well be uttered in a context where it hasn't been established yet
that Fred has a wife. A hearer who isn't informed about Fred's marital status
will typically infer from an utterance of (43a) that Fred is married, i.e. he will
accommodate Fred's wife globally, as in (43b), rather than locally, as in (43c).
Why Presumably because on the latter interpretation (43a) would generally
be a pointless thing to say. To be sure, one can imagine situations in which
the message represented by (43c) would be of interest, but such situations
would appear to be rather marginal.
Yet another possible way of motivating principle (C) is that it will often
yield readings that are intuitively simpler than possible alternatives. In some,
presumably 'illogical', sense, (43c) not only is less informative than (43b); it
is also more complex. If this is correct, it may help to explain why principle
(C) holds.
I have briefly indicated three ways of explaining why hearers should prefer
to project presuppositions to the highest possible DRS. These explanations
do not exclude one another, and it could turn out that some combination of
them is correct. This is as it may be. I don't have a more definite proposal to
make; I merely wanted to suggest some possible reasons why principle (C) is
a plausible one. That it is a plausible principle is not at issue; for, as I noted
already, there can hardly be any doubt that something along these lines is
required.
2.3 Constraints on interpretation
As a rule, people are remarkably tolerant when it comes to interpreting each
other's verbal behaviour. When one interprets an utterance, he assumes that
what the speaker wants to say makes sense and is useful, given the purposes
of the conversation. This mundane observation is the starting point of Grice's
seminal work on pragmatic reasoning. As is well known, Grice presents his
theory as a collection of conversational maxims, which he takes to be
instances of a single super maxim, viz. that speakers should be cooperative.
From the hearer's point of view, these maxims act as constraints on the