Lexical Pragmatics and Unification: The semantics of German causal ’durch’ (’through’)

Modelling the semantics of the German causal preposition durch (’by’, ’by means of’, ’through’) poses a challenge to formal-semantic analyses applying mechanisms of strict compositionality. To deal with this challenge, a formalism which is based on recent important developments in Discourse Representation Theory is developed, including a more elaborate analysis of presuppositional phenomena as well as the integration into the theory of unification as a mode of composition. It is argued that the observed unificational phenomena belong in the realm of pragmatics, providing an argument for presuppositional phenomena at the sentence-internal level.