Proceedings of the 6th Annual Meeting of the - Heinrich-Heine ...

examples:
(29) a. John can open Bill’s safe. He knows the combination.
b. John can open Bill’s safe. He’ll have to change the combination.
c. Bill has a safe which John can open. He knows the combination.
d. Bill has a safe which John can open. He’ll have to change the combination.
Experimental evidence suggests that, if anything, individuals referred to with the grammatical
subject of an antecedent sentence are ‘more salient’ than those referred to by other arguments (see
Gordon, Grosz & Gilliom 1993 i.a.). But this does not preclude ambiguous pronouns from
referring to less salient individuals in the context.
Moreover, even if the presupposition attaching to pronouns were that there is an individual
uniquely available for reference and this individual is the maximally salient one, that still isn’t
strong enough. After all, in (28)a, we could presuppose the one priest is maximally salient in some
possibilities while the other is in the others. In so doing we would still reach a quite sensible
understanding consistent with the principles or maxims of discourse.
One might suppose that pronouns presuppose an identifiabilty criterion to the effect that the
audience can recover what Perry (2001) calls an identifying condition satisfied by the referent.
Note that something like this presupposition arguably attaches to descriptions and E-type
pronouns. But a moment’s reflection would reveal that this is still too weak to rule out (28), given
that we always have the option of diagonalisation.
It may not have gone unnoticed that the diagonalisation strategy is not really necessary for cases
like (1)a, as the interpretation of the pronoun could just as well be understood rigidly to be the
individual at the end of the causal chain standing behind the speaker’s intention. But, of course,
this does not work in many other cases including ones such as in (1)b. An analytical move to
consider at this stage might involve pronouns being ambiguous between directly referential terms
and descriptions (functions from possibilities to individuals) - cf Stalnaker (1972) for such an
account of descriptions. But this will only relieve the problem if diagonalisation is not an option.
Even then it is less desirable than the unitary descriptive (E-type) account which handles all cases
alone. Curiously, van Rooy (2001) does take up the ambiguity option while maintaining that the
strategy of diagonalisation lies behind (1)a. That account is only saved from the problems (28)
poses by re-analysing what are clearly pragmatic phenomena as linguistic. One cost of this move
is the loss of any account of why the contextually odd uniqueness readings arise in the adversarial
discourses discussed above.
Suppose we were to assume that pronouns are descriptive. In that case, of course, all of the data
discussed in this paper would be treated in a satisfactory way without the need for the extra
pragmatic inference involving diagonalisation, just as an E-type advocate argues. However, if in
addition we were to assume that diagonalisation were a general strategy available to participants
anyway, then there does not seem any reason why it could not apply in cases like (28). In that
case, although the pronoun’s interpretation - a function from possibilities to individuals - could
not be recovered by the audience, a quite reasonable understanding of at least (28)a could be
obtained by assuming that the description in question is either, ‘the individual who is Father Jones’
or ‘the individual who is Father Smith’, and diagonalising.
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