Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

The binding theory 71
c. (Esker too ah coo-pay luh vee-and)
Non, je n'ai pas 'coo-pay luh vee-and' -—j'ai coupe la viande.
d. We didn't make love- love— we fucked.
e. We didn't fuck -— we made love.
If it is true, as Horn claims, that these and (62b) are all instances of the same
phenomenon, then presuppositional denials are not a problem for a theory
of presupposition projection; they can be relegated to a theory, such as
Horn's, which treats them on a par with the examples in (63).
In Geurts (1998a) I have discussed and criticized Horn's ideas at great
length, and here I will confine myself to a few general remarks and some
specific observations about presupposition denials. My main objection
against Horn's notion of metalinguistic negation is that it covers disparate
phenomena; it is not a coherent concept. In particular, presupposition denials
have nothing to do with the facts observed in (63). The only thing that all
these cases have in common is that they are intonationally ally marked, and that
they would typically be used to correct an utterance made by the previous
speaker. But the similarity doesn't go deeper than that. To see
this, note that the examples in (63) would normally be executed with a
contrastive intonation contour. In (63a), for instance, 'POlice' TOlice' is replaced
with 'poLICE', and this is reflected in the constrastive accents that these
words will get. On the other hand, (62b) isn't contrastive in any way, although
normally speaking this sentence will be intonationally marked, too, for
instance as follows:
(64) It WASN'T Harry's wife who shot the burglar: Harry is a
BACHELOR.
But this is not a contrastive intonation pattern.
Another way of seeing that the notion of metalinguistic negation is ill-
illconceived
is by asking ourselves whether it will cover a case like (62a).
Unlike (62b), this example can be realized without a heavily marked
intonation contour, so if someone should want to claim that this is an instance
of metalinguistic negation, he would have to explain why the markedness
that is allegedly one of the hallmarks of this phenomenon is absent here. If,
on the other hand, it is not treated as an instance of metalinguistic negation,
it presents the same problems to a theory of presupposition projection as
does (62b).
It is on the basis of considerations like these that I have argued that Horn's
metalinguistic negation is not a natural category; it forces together
phenomena that don't belong together. Hence, there is little hope for the
position that presupposition denials should be accounted for in nonpresuppositional
terms. This is bad news for the satisfaction theory because
non-