UNIVERSITY OF OSLO

Recent important developments within Discourse Representation Theory include a more elaborate formalisation and account of presuppositional phenomena, as well as the integration of unification as a mode of composition. Focusing on these issues, the following claims are made: (i) the varying compositional impact of some adverbials, ranging from merely constraining the properties of a predicate to radically altering them, is suitably modeled applying unification, and (ii) pragmatic mechanisms like bridging, presupposition verification and accommodation can apply word-internally for some lexical items. To substantiate these claims, the analysis will centre around the German causal preposition durch ('by', 'through', 'by means of'). 1 A challenge to strict compositionality An adverbial can be said to be a free syntactic constituent which modifies a predicate semantically. However, some adverbials not only modify a predicate, but may even radically alter its properties. Prepositional adjuncts headed by the German causal-instrumental preposition durch ('by', 'through', 'by means of') belong to one such class of adverbials (cf. section 5 for further examples). One of the main functions of durch is to mark its complement as the causing event in a causal relation between two events, as exemplified below