What Does It Mean for an Indefinite to Be Presuppositional?

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the nature of the presuppositionality involved in “strong” (or presuppositional) indefinite noun phrases in general, and Turkish accusative marked indefinites in particular. It investigates the semantics of Turkish accusative indefinites with regard to the categories of existential import, contextual restrictedness (or D-linking) and semantic scope, within the DRT-based Binding Theory of presupposition justification. It argues that neither contextual restrictedness nor scope properties alone can account for the semantics of Turkish Acc-indefinites. It further argues that existential import, modeled as anaphoricity encoded in the semantics of Acc-indefinites, is fundamental to “strong” indefiniteness in Turkish and can be construed as the source of both contextual restrictedness and wide scope behavior.

I gratefully acknowledge the feedback I received from two anonymous reviewers, Varol Akman, Cem Bozşahin, Daniel Büring, Elizabeth Coppock, Jin Cui, Cornelia Ebert, Chiara Gianollo, Aslı Göksel, Klaus von Heusinger, Hans Kamp, Yiğit Karahanoğulları, Cem Keskin, Paul Kiparsky, Jaklin Kornfilt, Sebastian Löbner, Rick Nouwen, Duygu Özge, Arndt Riester, Maribel Romero, Ceyhan Temürcü, Ümit Turan, and Deniz Zeyrek, and the material support of the German Science Foundation by Project C2 “Case and Referential Context” under Sonderforschungsbereich 732 “Incremental Specification in Context” of University of Stuttgart.