Yasutada Sudo (Ecole Normale Supérieure) will give a talk at 4:00Pm on Tuesday, February 12, in Machmer W-26. The title and an abstract of his talk follow.
Title: Presupposition Projection in Quantified Sentences and Cross-Dimensional Anaphora
Abstract:
Presupposition projection in quantified sentences has been a particularly tantalizing issue for theories of presupposition (Karttunen & Peters 1979, Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Beaver & Krahmer 2001, George 2008, Schlenker 2008, 2009, Chemla 2009, Fox 2012). In this talk I will offer a novel theory of presupposition projection in quantified sentences. Its main empirical support comes from the hitherto unnoticed correlation between presupposition projection through quantifiers and cross-sentential anaphora with quantificational antecedents: those quantifiers that support 'maxset anaphora' give rise to universal presuppositions, and those quantifiers that support 'refset anaphora' give rise to presuppositions weaker than universal presuppositions. I propose a multi-dimensional theory of presupposition where this correlation is directly captured by the mechanism of 'cross-dimensional anaphora'. The resulting theory, I claim, is empirically superior to its alternatives (cf. the first talk). In particular, it solves the Binding Problem that has plagued the multi-dimensional view of presupposition. Furthermore, it is also conceptually attractive in that it gives a principled explanation of the projection properties of quantificational expressions based on their anaphoric properties.
