Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

80 Presuppositions and Pronouns
park, showing sundry signs of grief (moaning, tears, wringing of hands). Fred
and Barney pass her by, and it is mutually clear to them that neither knows
the woman. Then Fred might say (79) to Barney, in an attempt to explain the
woman's obviously deplorable state. In this scenario, the intended reading of
(79) would require intermediate accommodation.
Another variety of intermediate accommodation occurs when a
presupposition X % is is triggered in in the scope of a quantifying expression a and
X contains a reference marker bound by a. The binding theory predicts that
in such an event global accommodation is excluded (because the resulting
DRS would not be a proper one), and on the next-preferred reading % X
restricts a's oc's domain. The following is a case in point:
(80) Everyone of my friends has sold his copy of 'Lolita'.
This will ordinarily interpreted as saying that everyone of my friends who
had a copy of 'Lolita' sold it. On this reading, an occasional friend who didn't
have a copy of 'Lolita', and therefore couldn't sell it either, does not falsify
(80).16 To show in some detail how the binding theory accounts for this
reading, I will employ Kamp and Reyle's (1993) 'duplex conditions'. This is
not because I want to advocate this proposal, but because this is as good an
opportunity as any for explaining why I will not adopt it later on.
(81) a. [: [x: friend x](every x)[!!, x)[u, y: v: Lolita v, u owned v, v. x sold v]]
b. [: [x, u: u = x, friend x](every x> x)
[u, y: v: Lolita v, v. u owned v, x sold v]]
c. [: [x: friend x](every x)[y: Lolita v, v. x owned v, v. x sold v]]
d. [: [x, v: friend x, Lolita v, x owned v](every x)[: x sold v]]
(81a) is the semantic representation of (80) in which only the two
presuppositions triggered by his copy of 'Lolita' remain to be processed.
(81a) contains a single duplex condition of the form '