Presupposition and Rules for Anaphora

Kripke (2009) points out that many presuppositional elements are anaphoric to previous discourse or contextural elements, and claims that we need a theory of presuppositional anaphora, analogous to the corresponding pronominal theory. However, he does not suggest any particular anaphora rules for presupposition. Some presuppositions are related to lexical meanings of particular words, while others are related to particular structures of sentences. Presuppositions related to both lexical meanings and structural characteristics can be dealt with by the semantic anaphoric rule and the syntactic anaphoric rule for presupposition, respectively. On the contrary, presuppositions related to pragmatic aspects can be accounted for by pragmatic anaphoric rules. However, the former are not independent of the latter. In other words, we may regard the former as a part of the latter. For this reason, I propose unified anaphoric rules for presupposition. They capture the nature of presupposition relatively well.