Partial matches and the interpretation of anaphoric noun phrases
We take van der Sandt's presuppositions-as-anaphors approach
as a starting point for a research program that seeks to sort out what the
possible interpretations of potentially `anaphoric' noun phrases are, and how
the preference order between them may be determined. We make a number of
revisions to van der Sandt's original theory, in particular wheer the treatment
of anaphoric NPs is concerned which match only partially with their designated
antecedent. Once these modifications have been made, we propose a general
scheme that associates uniform presuppositions to NPs of all syntactic
categories. The underlying assumption is that all these NPs can be dependent in
their interpretation on preceding NPs. However, this dependency relation
between NPs is not unrestricted and a number of the relevant restrictions will
be discussed.
Emiel Krahmer and Kees van Deemter