Existential Belief and Presupposition Projection

Recent experimental studies suggest that presupposition projection in the scope of nominal quantifiers depends on the force of the quantifier. If this observation is correct, a natural question arises: are there parallel differences between quantifiers of other types, e.g. modal quantifiers? This thesis aims to answer this question with respect to attitude verbs, which are traditionally modeled as quantifiers over possible worlds. The data come from Russian, which, unlike many languages, have belief verbs with both universal (e.g. sčitat’ ‘believe’) and existential (dopuskat’ ‘allow for the possibility’) quantificational force. Building on the results of two experiments, I suggest that the default projection patterns in Russian universal and existential belief reports are the same. Then, I attempt to figure out the consequences of this finding for formal theories of projection, focusing primarily on a group of recent theories which assimilate (at least some) presuppositions with scalar implicatures. These theories were claimed to be successful in accounting for projection in the scope of different nominal quantifiers. I show, however, that they fail to predict the observed projection pattern in existential belief reports. By contrast, predictions of more traditional approaches, in particular of satisfaction theory, seem correct. I argue that this fact constitutes a serious challenge for scalar implicature-based theories of projection, in addition to the evidence from psycholinguistic studies.