PRESUPPOSITION PROJECTION as PROOF CONSTRUCTION

Van der Sandt s anaphoric account of presupposition is gen erally considered to be the theory which makes the best empiri cal predictions about presupposition projection see e g Beaver The main insight is that there is an interesting cor respondence between the behavior of anaphoric pronouns in dis course 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 Van der Sandt contends that there is also an important di erence between pronouns and presuppositions when there is no antecedent for an anaphoric pronoun the sen tence containing the pronoun cannot be interpreted However when there is no antecedent for a presupposition and the pre supposition has su cient descriptive content then the presup position 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 A problem with Van der Sandt s approach is that it does not take the in uence of world knowledge into account see e g Beaver Consider