/S0aanes 1979/provides some counterexamples to the theory of natural language presuppositions that is presented in /Gazdar 1979/. /Soames 1982/ provides a theory which explains these eounterexamples. /Mercer 1987/ rejects the solution found in/Soames 1982/ leaving these eounterexamples unexplained. By reappraising these insightful counterexamples, the inferential theory for natural language pre...

Presuppositions are very important in our understanding of how background and context determine the interpretation of a sentence. However, if we study some of the things that have been claimed to be presuppositions, we find that it is a very miscellaneous collection of things. Here are some examples: (1) Harry saw the man kiss her presupposes that Harry and the man denote uniquely existing, for...

If a sentence is ambiguous, it often happens that the correct reading is the one which can most easily be incorporated into the discourse context. In this paper we present a simple method for implementing this intuition using the mechanism of presupposition resolution. The basic idea is that we can choose between the alternative readings of an ambiguous sentence by picking the reading which has...

This paper is about reasoning with presuppositions in natural language. Pre-supposition accommodation, as predicted by the linguistic theory of presupposi-tions as anaphoric expressions, is reconstructed logically as abductive inference in a framework that supports both anaphoric links and a context-dependent notion of propositionhood. Abductive inference arises as a side-eeect of the use of th...

In this paper, I argue that content of some presuppositions is determined dynamically. particular, it shown the presupposition want in control constructions depends on interpretation an action complement clause. Different presuppositional sentences with argued for using new and known observations about licensing Polarity Sensitive Items. propose to capture dynamic nature AGM paradigm belief rev...

In traditional pragmatic theories the notion of context plays two roles: (i) it should contain enough information about the conversational situation to determine what is expressed by a sentence; (ii) it should contain enough information about what the participants of the conversation commonly assume about the subject matter of the conversation to determine whether what is said by a speaker is a...

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 resol...