Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

60 Presuppositions and Pronouns
These constraints act upon the interpretation process through the hearer's
presumption that they will not be violated. Accordingly, the hearer tries to
come up with an interpretation which violates as few of these constraints as
possible. However, the Gricean constraints will sometimes pull in opposite
directions. It may happen that the hearer must choose between an
interpretation which violates the consistency constraint and another reading
which violates the informativeness constraint. I will assume that, in such a
situation, the consistency constraint takes priority over the informativeness
constraint. This accords with the familiar observation that the quality
maxim has a special status among the maxims: it is more urgent for a
statement to be consistent than to be informative (cf. Grice 1981, Gazdar
1979: 46-48).
4~8).
There are many respects in which the constraints in (44) regulate the
interpretation of an utterance, and presupposition projection is just one of
many processes affected. The principles of the binding theory interact with
these constraints in different ways, some of which are more interesting than
others. Let me begin with a less interesting case. In the following examples,
there are conflicts between principle (A), which says that presuppositions
must be project, and the consistency and informativeness constraints,
respectively:
(46) a. France is a republic. The King of France is bald.
b. The King of France is bald. The King of France is bald.
In (46a) the presupposition cannot be bound, obviously, and it cannot be
accommodated without violating the consistency constraint. Similarly, the
presupposition triggered by the second occurrence of the King of France in
(46b) can neither be bound nor accommodated without violating the
informativeness constraint. Intuitively, I should say that in both cases
projection 'succeeds', and Gricean constraints are consequently violated, but
I set no great store by intuitions about this sort of example (cf. § 1.6), and
henceforth I will assume for convenience that principle (A) of the binding
theory is not defeasible.
Things become more interesting when we consider principle (B), which
says that binding is preferred to accommodation. The following example
shows this principle to be defeasible by general constraints on interpretation:
(47) Fred's wife will be at the reception, so Barney will be sorry that his
wife can't come.
Suppose the hearer doesn't know that Barney is married. In principle, the
presupposition triggered by his wife may therefore be bound to the reference
marker representing Fred's wife. But if the presupposition were so bound,
the resulting interpretation would be inconsistent, and therefore an