December 9, 16-17.30 h.,Erasmusbuilding 20.03a

Abstract: In this talk I want to revive and unite several promising branches of research in the formal semantics of natural language which have been deemed dead and incompatible in the (informal) literature. I want to make a case for the Montagovian treatment of presupposition offered by Karttunen and Peters in the 70-ies, show that it is consistent with the most succesful treatment of presupposition offered by Geurts and van der Sandt in the 80-ies, and that it readily generates a perspective on noun phrases which does not force us to postulate any exceptions on so-called island constraints, a problem which has puzzled so many researchers in the 90-ies.