Abstract:
Building on the
theory of local contexts of Schlenker 2009, we
reconstruct some results of the analysis of presupposition projection
offered by DRT (van der Sandt 1992, Geurts 1999). The theory of
Schlenker 2009 offered a way to annotate every sentence with context
variables that denote the various local context sets that play a
crucial role in Heim’s satisfaction theory (Heim 1983). In the latter,
a presupposition must be entailed by its local context. Here we allow a
presupposition to be indexed with other local contexts, and we propose
– following van der Sandt 1992 and Zeevat 1992 – that
presuppositions are preferably anaphoric to the highest possible
context. The resulting analysis emulates some desirable resoluts of DRT
– notably its solution to the ‘Proviso Problem’ (Geurts 1999). But it
arguably improves on DRT in some respects: it can in some cases
generate genuine conditional presuppositions; and it yields more
adequate results for quantified examples. Several limitations of the
theory – some of them quite serious – are also discussed.