Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
possible to replace a bound presupposition with an anaphoric alternative instead
support the opposite conclusion, that if hierarchical structure affects the availability
of antecedents for triggered presuppositions, then it does not do it in the same way
as it restricts availability of antecedents for anaphoric expressions.
4.5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
I believe the corpus data supports the claim of the binding theory that presupposed
information and anaphoric information behave in a similar way. On several
different counts induced presuppositions seem to behave similarly to discourse
anaphor. However, they are more versatile in many respects. Because presupposed
information is descriptively richer and has semantic weight it can have functions in
discourse situations that are not found with anaphoric alternatives. To sum up, in
examples (15), (16) and (17) presuppositional expressions were able to precisely
refer to already given information, even in cases where a pronominal anaphor was
possible, but using it would not have had the same meaning. In some cases it can
have a summarizing function. In other cases where an anaphoric alternative was
possible the use of a presuppositional expression also contributed additional
rhetorical effect that the anaphoric alternative would not have, e.g. (18), (19), (20)
and (21). There are also cases where the recognition that the presupposed
information and the potential antecedent refer to the same information is necessary
for a coherent interpretation of the discourse, e.g. (24). Example (22) seems to
suggest that even in cases of great distance, and where the presupposition could not
be replaced with a semantically empty anaphoric pronoun, hearers may actually be
perceiving the presupposed information as anaphoric. Finally, example (26) shows
that presuppositional expressions can function in contexts in a way similar to what
has been generally described as discourse pops, retrieving an antecedent from an
earlier abandoned topic after an intervening discussion.
Given the difficulties in identifying antecedents discussed above, it might
seem simpler to use some version of the satisfaction theory, only intuitively
considering the discourse record to see if the information presupposed is already
satisfied by information given earlier in the discourse. If it were satisfied, simply
considering the triggered presupposition to be felicitously used and leaving it at that
would simplify the analysis immensely. But this strategy would also have completely
obscured the other functions that the presupposed information had in the
discourse. Seeing that the already given information and the presupposed
information together add rhetorical effect or seeing that they are creating a new
abstract object, or understanding how they make a conclusion more concrete and
explicit by the use of the presuppositional expression, as in examples (15), (16) and
(17), is part of what speakers perceive about the information exchanged, and is
certainly something we want to be aware of in resolving presuppositions.
Therefore, I maintain that we need a binding analogy to account for these
examples, because we need to identify the linguistic expression from which the
antecedent is derived to see how it fits in with the rest of the discourse.
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