Presupposition Justification by Abduction and Quantified Presuppositions

Abstract

The presuppositions originating from triggering expressions embedded under quantifiers have been crucial test cases both for projection theories of presupposition and for discourse representation theory and dynamic semantics theories. In this paper some of these data are reviewed. The examples are sometimes considered within context, and projection data are discussed, The conclusion about the data differs from previous assessments in the literature.  A simple generalization is argued for which lends support to the satisfaction theory of presuppositions and does not directly involve a notion of sentence or discourse topic.Although the generalization supports the satisfaction theory, its formal realization demands additional theoretical flexibility. In the theoretical part, a formal tool offering this additional flexibility is presented: presupposition justification based on abduction within discourse representation theory. This formalism is applied to some central data. For each example, the justification problems and their possible solutions are computed and discussed briefly.