Lukas Lewerentz (DPhil, St. Hugh’s College): 'The Varieties of Expressive Presuppositions'
Chair: Beatriz Santos, BPhil (Lincoln College)
The expressive presuppositions of a sentence are the conditions under which the sentence expresses a proposition. By looking at the expressive presuppositions triggered by third-person pronouns such as `she' or `he', I argue that we have to keep apart different kinds of expressive presuppositions, in particular for the purposes of providing an adequate account of presupposition projection, that is, of when presuppositions survive or disappear if the presupposition trigger is embedded in complex expressions. I sketch how this can be done if we assume that pronouns are semantically treated as variables. And I tentatively conclude that the existence of different types of expressive presuppositions shows that there is no grand uniform account of presupposition projection to be found.
