Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 4
For many of the examples, the semantic information contributed by the
linguistic expressions alone was only a weak indication that presuppositional
binding was taking place. If the predicative role of the presupposed material and
how the binding relationship contributes to the coherence of the discourse are
understood, then the only way to arrive at a coherent interpretation is by binding
between the presuppositional expressions and the earlier information. This result
seems to support Asher & Lascarides’ (1998b) emphasis on the role of pragmatic
information in resolving presuppositions, at least for binding examples. Until we
have a clearer idea of how to determine when linguistic expressions are referring to
the same information, we can use our understanding of how binding would
contribute to understanding the rhetorical relationship between utterances in the
discourse as collaborating evidence that we are dealing with bound
presuppositional information.
The ability of the presuppositional expressions to have these extra discourse
functions seems to be largely dependent on the type of semantic object that the
trigger induces.. The function of anaphors in context differs according to the type
of semantic individual they refer to as does the function of presuppositions.
Anaphoric expressions that refer to concrete semantic individuals have an
identifying function, whether they identify an already given individual, or in the
cases of set-relationship anaphors, an individual from a given set. The same goes
for presuppositions of concrete semantic individuals. Triggers that presuppose
concrete semantic individuals, e.g. a subset of the category identified by Zeevat as
the referential anaphoric triggers and represented in the corpus by definite NPs, seem to
serve either an identifying function alone or in combination with the addition of
more descriptive information. Zeevat (to appear) argues that the use of these
triggers only helps to supply referents for predications and to link the descriptive
meaning that they are associated with to the right semantic individual in the
discourse representation, i.e. “it is by no means clear that the role these referring
expressions play in defining the thought expressed by the sentence in which they
occur depends much on the content of their presuppositions.” (p. 9, Zeevat, to
appear). Concrete individuals are generally in an identity relationship with their
antecedents. Their correct resolution can contribute to understanding the discourse
structure but this is not their main function in discourse. Whereas triggers that
induce presuppositions of abstract objects can display extra functions more easily
because the antecedent that they will be binding with is also an abstract object.
Because of the lack of individuation of abstract objects, the descriptive content
contained in the triggered presupposition can shape or delimit this object more
than pronominal anaphoric reference could, or more than concrete anaphoric
references can delimit their antecedents. Also, because of the additional descriptive
content we can create rhetorical effects by repetitions and other means that are less
available with concrete anaphoric reference. For these reasons, I think the type of
semantic object that the trigger induces will support these additional functions, and
in the case of abstract presuppositions, it supports these extra effects.
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