Abstract In recent work on the semantics of definite descriptions, some theorists (Elbourne in Definite Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Schoubye Noûs 47(3):496–533, 2013) have advocated broadly Fregean accounts, whereby a description ‘the F ’ introduces presupposition to effect that there is exactly one and refers it if is, while other (Abbott, in: Gundel, Hedberg (eds) Reference: Interd...

Most theori~s of presupposition implicitly assume that pre-supposition,; are facts, and that all agents involved in a discourse share belief in the presuppositions that it generates. These unrealistic assumptions can be eliminated if each presupposition is treated as the belief of an agent. However, it ~s not enough to consider only the beliefs of the speaker; we show that the beliefs of other ...

Abstract Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that simply not care about the full range presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices are now construed triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘il...

This paper gives a formal theory of presupposition using situation semantics developed by Barwise and Perry, We will slightly modify Barwise and Perry's original theory of situation semantics so that we can deal with non-monotonic reasonings which are very important for the formalization of presupposition in natural language. This aspect is closely related to the formalization of incomplete kno...

In this paper, we study Verb-phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and show its relationship to presupposition and its failure. In doing so, we use a novel representation of VPE by means of a dynamic semantics approach, using an extended version of Dynamic Predicate Logic which includes procedures, scope rules and functions. We focus on the representation of the strict/sloppy ambiguity in connection with ellip...

This paper looks at presuppositions of adpositions, a topic which has not been examined much, in spite of the very large body of work on presuppositions. Some earlier assertions about adpositional presuppositions turn out not to be relevant, because (1) they are incorrect (2) presuppose and/or presupposition are not used in a technical sense in them, or (3) the presuppositions involved are not ...