Presuppositions as anaphors revisited

Van der Sandt’s theory of presuppositions-as-anaphors has been argued to be the empirically most adequate theory of presupposition projection on the market. One of the main differences between Van der Sandt’s approach and its main competitor, the contextual satisfaction approach, lies in the treatment of the so-called partial match phenomenon. In this paper, we show that the distinction between partial and full matches should be a central element of any theory of presupposition projection. However, we also argue that Van der Sandt’s own formal theory, as it stands, does not offer an adequate treatment of partial matches. We then propose a modification of his formal theory, which will be argued to be more general, formally more precise, and empirically more adequate than its predecessor.