Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

The binding theory 73
(67) The doctor kept warning him but he never would listen, and now
Harry's dead.
In this case, too, the personal pronoun him must be construed by way of
accommodation (he is an ordinary anaphor); all the hearer can do is set up a
reference marker representing a male individual. This representation is a
provisional one in the sense that it is not clear yet whom the speaker is
referring to. There are some non-trivial problems with this account, but these
are of no consequence to the main point that I want to make here, which is
that a pronoun that 'refers forward' must be construed by means of
accommodation. The phenomenon of forward reference will be further
discussed in § 4.3.
These examples were merely to show that sometimes even the
presuppositions triggered by pronouns can be accommodated. The cases
that I want to discuss in this section are in a sense intermediate ones. On the
one hand, it is not obvious that they are instances of accommodation. On the
other hand, they involve uses of pronouns that don't seem to require an
explicit linguistic antecedent. More accurately, these pronouns pick up
reference markers that are not made available by linguistic antecedents in
the standard way. The following examples are from Douloureux (1971):
(68) a. John bled so much it soaked through his bandage and stained
his shirt.
b. When Little Johnny threw up, was there any pencil-eraser in
it it!
In both of these cases a pronoun occurs that is perfectly comprehensible
although it doesn't pick up an object that was explicitly introduced. 14
Intuitively, the reason why such uses are possible is that, although the
intended referent has not been properly introduced, it can be inferred from
what has been said already, and is sufficiently salient. So these are instances
of binding, not accommodation, but they are different from the standard
14 14 Some speakers of English will judge that such uses are sloppy and should be avoided, but that
doesn't seem to deter others from saying things like this. Note, furthermore, that the use of the
pronoun in (68b) is a functional one in the sense that it allows the speaker to avoid the word
vomit and its synonyms. I have heard such uses being called 'taboo pronouns', which I find a
happy expression, but I don't know who has coined this term. That the use of taboo pronouns is
not without risks is shown by the following example, whose source I cannot reveal:
„,, f decapitated }
When Fred was
{ . . , >, it in [
circumcised deCaPitated} \
,It . was caught
°
m . a basket.
Examples like (68a, b) were much discussed in the seventies and early eighties, but seem to have
gone out of fashion since. For further observations and discussion, see Lakoff and Ross (1972),
Hirst (1981: 14-16), and Bosch (1983:134-137). 134-137).