Abstract:

(based on joint work with Amir Anvari)

There are close parallels between patterns of presupposition projection, and anaphoric accessibility: both exhibit a left-to-right bias in many environments, such as conjunctive and conditional sentences (Heim 1982, 1983). The exception that proves the rule however is their parallel symmetric behavior in disjunctive sentences (Karttunen 1973, Evans 1977), as illustrated in (1) for presupposition and (2) for anaphora.

(1)
a. Either Benjamin never smoked, or he continues to do so.
b. Either Benjamin continues to smoke, or he never did so.

(2)
a. Either there isn't a bathroom, or it's in a funny place.
b. Either it's in a funny place, or there isn't a bathroom.

This close connection suggests a uniform explanation. The modest goal of this talk is to develop a static treatment of anaphora (incorporating insights from Rothschild 2017, George 2008, Heim 2024, a.o.) which captures this parallelism, focusing particularly on cataphora in disjunctions as in (2b). The framework we develop is a quadrivalent extension of the trivalent approach to presupposition, the insight being that both pronouns and indefinites are projective, but in distinct ways.