earticle

영어

In this paper I address the issue of why some presupposition triggers in English, such as too and incomplete definite descriptions, are typically difficult to accommodate and require specific contexts to license them. I propose that non-accommo-datability of both triggers is due to the fact that one of their arguments is underspecified, which is logically represented as a free variable, and therefore, a specific linguistic or non-linguistic context is obligatorily required to assign a value to the argument: this explains why sentences containing them are infelicitous out of the blue. I suggest that too is a relational operator with two arguments, the sentence to which it is adjoined provides one argument, and the other is unarticulated, of which value is identified by a context. Non-accommodatability of incomplete definite descriptions is attributed to the fact that definite article the is also a relational operator of which two arguments are descriptive content and a contextually provided domain within which the uniqueness of their referents is warranted.