Reducing pronoun accessibility to presupposition satisfaction

Abstract Under what conditions can a pronoun refer to a given antecedent? It has long been noted that there is a connection between pronouns’ accessibility conditions and patterns of presupposition satisfaction. In this paper, this connection is explicitly spelled out in the form of the existence generalization: a pronoun may refer to an (indefinite) antecedent if and only if a witness for that indefinite can be presupposed to exist at the point where the pronoun is used. We show that, while dynamic approaches and E-type approaches do expect some parallels to hold between presupposition satisfaction and accessibility conditions for pronouns, they do not validate the existence generalization as a matter of principle. As a result, they face various under-generation problems, which they must solve through a set of unrelated assumptions. This work proposes a system that revives the choice-functional approach of Egli and Von Heusinger (1995) ; van der Does (1993) and can account for the generalization in full. In this system, a pronoun’s accessibility conditions is an existence presupposition simpliciter and the existence generalization is validated as a matter of principle. With relatively minimal tooling, this approach derives an interesting range of cases (bathroom sentences, cataphoric possibilities, donkey sentences, subordination). Some limitations and possible extensions are discussed: existential/universal readings and non-indefinite antecedents.