Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 5
based on the bi-directional optimality theory version of the binding theory. They
propose that a lack of alternative expressions that will not need to be
accommodated licenses accommodation. Both proposals make some incorrect or
unclear predictions when applied to a range of empirical data. In addition, they are
difficult to evaluate when applied to real examples because many key concepts used
in the proposals are not well defined. Each explanation also addresses different
factors that seem to play a role in ease of accommodation and tendency to
accommodate. I will also show that accommodated information projected to the
main DRS in the corpus examples is often linked to it via bound pronominal or
presuppositional expressions. This linking may also contribute to the felicity of
accommodation in these examples.
Finally, in 5.4, I question the proposed preference for higher levels of
accommodation over lower levels. There are two main proposals in the literature,
the informativeness principle (IP) (discussed in Blutner 2000, Zeevat to appear),
which states that hearers prefer the logically strongest reading, and the buoyancy
principle (BP) (Geurts, 1999), which says that presuppositions prefer to be globally
accommodated because they are background information, and background
information prefers to be as high as possible in the DRS. In a recent article, Geurts
(2001) has pointed out that neither proposal is very convincing.
Corpus study is an appropriate method for investigating preferences 1 and
here we find some surprising results counter to earlier theoretical proposals. The
corpus data does not support a general preference for global accommodation for all
trigger types because factives in particular were locally accommodated as often as
globally. I will suggest that there are different preferences for trigger types to occur
under embedding, and when they do, the triggered presuppositions exhibit
different tendencies to be globally accommodated. Projection preferences for
presupposed information then have to do with the triggered presupposition’s
semantic type, the type of embedding under which it is induced and the function it
can have in the discourse. While this idea is still very speculative, I hope some of
my observations may encourage more research into this question.
5.1 CORPUS EXAMPLES OF ACCOMMODATION
In both the binding theory and the satisfaction theory, accommodating a
presupposition is a secondary step in the analysis. We first try to bind, or
alternatively we check the context to see if the presupposition is already satisfied.
Only when these strategies have failed do we resolve the presupposition by
accommodation. For this reason the only examples discussed are cases where
binding was already ruled out as a possible analysis.
In the binding theory, accommodation can take place globally, intermediately
or locally. Note that all three levels of accommodation are available only when the
1 Because if we find that a preference is a tendency to prefer expressing information in one
manner over another, and frequencies are the quantitative result of tendencies.
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