ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the principles that determine the range of NPs that can appear in post-verbal position in ES. As the author would like to retain the term 'definite' for a more restricted range of NPs he will use the term Quantification Effect (QE) in what follows. He indicates some limitations of McCawley's analysis. Of the two replies in the negative one seems most felicitous, which would not be predicted given Barwise and Cooper's analysis. According to Prince's proposal, every potential sentence pre-supposition corresponds on the level of discourse to a stated assumption (SA). Whereas SAs arise as a result of being uttered, participants in a discourse carry their own set of assumptions. These are tacit assumptions (TAs) and may be either stereotypic or particular. Prince proposes that certain lexical items and certain syntactic patterns give rise to potential sentence presuppositions (PSPs).
