Presuppositional Binding

This chapter discusses the notion of variable binding in theories of presupposition and focuses in particular on the so‐called binding problem of presuppositions. This problem was first formulated by Karttunen and Peters in 1979, discussed by various authors, and subsequently taken up by Heim 1983. The binding problem arises in pragmatic and two‐dimensional approaches, that is in theories that divorce the presuppositional contribution and the content of natural language sentences, and treat them along separate dimensions. The first part of this chapter discusses the fact that presuppositions are a prerequisite for interpretation by binding into open content expressions. In the second part we go into the binding problem in more detail and discuss in particular the two‐dimensional account of Karttunen and Peters, Heim's suggestions about local accommodation, and the way the problem is treated in the anaphoric account of presupposition. It transpires that on the latter account the binding problem does not arise. This is due to a quite intuitive and semantically motivated constraint known as trapping. Presuppositions have internal structure and may embed further presuppositions. Such embedded presuppositions may already be bound at some level of discourse structure. The trapping constraint assures that when such an embedded presupposition has been bound, its embedder can never be accommodated at any higher level of discourse. The reason is that accommodation of the embedder at any higher level would give rise to free variables that cannot access their antecedent anymore, and the resulting structure would thus lack an interpretation.