Abstract
Notwithstanding various attempts at explaining existential import in non-presuppositional terms, it is argued that the Strawsonian view remains the best: existential import is a matter of presupposition. More accurately: it is argued that Strawson’s mature view, as expressed in his paper of 1964, provides the best account of speakers’ intuitions. This entails that the semantic approach to presupposition, associated with Strawson’s earlier work, goes by the board. It also entails that the presuppositional requirements of an expression are never purely existential in nature. A strong quantifier does not merely presuppose that its domain is non-empty; rather, the purpose of its presupposition is to recover a suitable domain from the context.
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Geurts, B. (2008). Existential Import. In: Comorovski, I., von Heusinger, K. (eds) Existence: Semantics and Syntax. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 84. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6197-4_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6197-4_9
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