<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W01-1604">
  <Title>Against the Identification of Anaphora and Presupposition</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Theories that are empirically incorrect - or incorrect with respect to one or the other detail may still be conceptually enlightening and give us a fundamentally correct model of the phenomena in question. I doubt that this is the case for the PIA hypothesis. It obliterates a distinction between two phenomena that are different in an interesting way: The business of anaphora proper is the maintenance of reference in discourse (I am not talking here of the entirely different phenomenon of bound or &amp;quot;syntactic&amp;quot; anaphora (cf. Bosch 1983), which is rather a morphosyntactic matter and has nothing to do with either reference or presupposition).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Presupposition on the other hand - and here I agree with van der Sandt (1992) - is not essentially bound up with reference, but is an inferential mechanism that contributes to discourse coherence in its own way by constraining the notion of contextual acceptability - pretty much the way proposed in van der Sandt (1988).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The attempt to iron out some of the remaining difficulties in the latter approach by reducing presupposition to anaphora may be technically viable (but since this is not my issue here, I choose to remain agnostic with respect to this question), but it assumes a notion of anaphora that is, I believe, eventually not very helpful.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> My unsolicited advice, then, is this: Let us grant that van der Sandt and Geurts have demonstrated a very close connection, that was previously never properly detailed, between anaphora and presupposition. This much understood, we had better turn to some of the questions where current insight about anaphora and presupposition is pretty poor and where we may still learn a lot more about both phenomena and their relation. I am thinking, in particular, of the possibly very different relation of anaphora and presupposition to compositionality: One may reasonably hold that presupposition relations can be modelled compositionally. There is no way, however, as far as I can see for a realistic compositional model of anaphoric relations. But this is clearly a topic for another paper.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>