Originally planned for December 2020, the Stuttgart honorary symposium marking the 80th birthday of Hans Kamp is finally taking place in June 2022. Here is my contribution to the June 25 panel discussion.
The serious item
I would like to refocus on a result, dating from the first half of the 1990s, which in my opinion has not retained the attention it merits. In a nutshell, this result is: So-called anaphoric accommodation effects are explained by assuming, one, that presuppositions have separate discourse representations, two, that presuppositions are resolved through binding discourse referents, and three, that presupposition DRSs are proper, that is, they do not contain free discourse referents. The first two assumptions were made in work by Hans and in work by Rob, the third was made by Hans and Uwe in their 1993 book, and the result itself was demonstrated in a plenary lecture Hans gave at the 1991 Amsterdam Colloquium and in a paper prepublished in 1992, coauthored with Antje, "Remarks on lexical structure, DRS construction, and lexically driven inferences".
Let me elaborate just a little bit. Observations of anaphoric accommodation effects had been made in unpublished work by Kripke and in prepublished work by Irene Heim, "Presupposition projection" dating from 1987. One example: If I say "Joe broke his leg in July 1933, and Jack also broke his leg at the age of 15", you can infer that Joe was 15 in July 1933. But pure accommodation of the presupposition triggered by "also" would only yield the inference that Joe broke his leg when he was 15 (and this is so even if the alternative to the associate of "also" is treated as an anaphoric discourse referent!), so, what is accommodated is stronger than necessary. In fact, this and other cases show that often, accommodation does not consist in taking the shortest logical route to recreating the presupposition but reuses the discourse referents already present; in the case at hand, a presupposed event of breaking a leg at the age of 15 is unified with the contextual event of breaking a leg in July 1933. In the words of Kamp and Roßdeutscher (1992), accommodating new discourse referents carries a higher price than accommodating new conditions on old ones.
As a consequence, presuppositions can provide new information by virtue of being presuppositions. To put it differently, the result of accommodation can be something over and above what it would be if the presupposition were an assertion. It is a well-known fact that notably factive presuppositions can carry new information, but this is different: Accommodation yields information that is new both with respect to the context and to the carrier sentence.
Note now that this does not yet follow from the presupposition-as-anaphora theory as such. It is crucial to assume that all discourse referents occurring in the representation of a presupposition are in fact introduced there, and in fact, in the universe of the main presupposition DRS, whether the referent originates in a presupposition trigger, a definite, an indefinite or, implicitly, a verb, as event discourse referents do, – and hence that they are all anaphoric, owing to the general definition of presupposition resolution, giving priority to binding.
Further, this result has an interesting application to the phenomenon of what has become known as Null Complement Anaphora, predicting that all null complement referents that occur in presuppositions are anaphoric. And further still, the principle of referent recycling, later adopted in work by Petra Hendriks and Helen de Hoop and by Henk Zeevat in work on optimality theoretic semantics and pragmatics as the constraint *NEW, is operative more generally, even in the absence of presupposition triggers. This has in fact also been with us for 30 years; in his 1992 paper "Disambiguation in Discourse", Hans proposed the Principle of event minimization: The better interpretation is that which can make do with a minimum of happenings.
The humorous item
The year is 1993, the month is June: Manfred Krifka is bicycling in Oslo. I am right behind him. Suddenly he almost falls off his bike laughing: He has seen a street sign.
The story behind his convulsion is the dialectic of who invented Dynamic semantics: was it Kamp or was it Heim – one a thesis, the other an antithesis. Manfred had seen the perfect synthesis.
The 2011 portrait is a link: Click it!