Specific Indefinites, Presupposition and Scope

In the past few years it has been suggested by several independent sources that specificity and presupposition are kindred phenomena. My proposal is to relate specificity and presupposition to each other not by reducing the former to the latter, as in earlier accounts, but by subsuming them under a more comprehensive rubric, which I call backgrounding. I argue that this view doesn't suffer from the problems other theories are faced with, and that it sheds new light on presupposition projection as well as on a number of phenomena that thus far lacked a systematic account.