Presupposition Projection as Proof Construction

Abstract

Van der Sandt’s (1992) anaphoric account of presupposition is generally considered to be the theory which makes the best empirical predictions about presupposition projection (see e.g. Beaver 1997:983). The main insight is that there is an interesting correspondence between the behavior of anaphoric pronouns in discourse and the projection of presuppositions in complex sentences. Van der Sandt proposes to ‘resolve’ presuppositions just like anaphoric pronouns are resolved in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, Kamp & Reyle, 1993). Van der Sandt contends that there is also an important difference between pronouns and presuppositions: when there is no antecedent for an anaphoric pronoun, the sentence containing the pronoun cannot be interpreted. However, when there is no antecedent for a presupposition — and the presupposition has sufficient descriptive content — then the presupposition can be accommodated and, as it were, create its own antecedent. This combination of resolution and accommodation constitutes the empirical strength of van der Sandt’s approach.