Parsimonious Semantic Representations with Projection Pointers

The influential idea by van der Sandt (1992) to treat presuppositions as anaphora in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, Kamp and Reyle, 1993) has inspired a lot of debate as well as elaborations of his account. In this paper, we propose an extension of DRT, called Projective DRT, which adds pointers to all DRT referents and conditions, indicating their projection site. This means that projected content need not be moved from the context in which it is introduced, while it re- mains clearly discernible from asserted content. This approach inherits the attractive properties from van der Sandt’s approach to presupposition, but precludes a two-step resolution algorithm by treating projection as variable binding, which increases compositionality and computational efficiency. The result is a flexible representational framework for a descriptive theory of projection phenomena