Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
presupposition is triggered under an embedding that creates at least two contexts.
To be able to correctly discuss preferences for higher levels of accommodation
over lower ones, only cases where there was some type of embedding should be
included in the count. For this reason I will make a distinction between global
accommodation (GLOBAL) for cases where the presupposition is triggered in at least
one level of embedding, and main accommodation (MAIN), where there is no
embedded context and the only level possible for accommodation is in the main
DRS, i.e. where the home DRS of the trigger is the main DRS of the discourse.
This means that accommodation at each level was tested to determine if the
resolution would result in a well-formed DRS, e.g. with no unbound variables, as
well as a DRS acceptable from a discourse perspective, i.e. both consistent and
informative. Currently, cases of INTERMEDIATE accommodation are counted with
LOCAL because it was often unclear what the differences in readings will be
between intermediate and local accommodation.
Table 5 presents the number of examples of each type found in the London-
Lund corpus.
Main DRS (MAIN) and global accommodation (GLOBAL) were the most
frequent analysis for presuppositions triggered by all trigger types except for too.
The low number of examples of GLOBAL and LOCAL accommodation may be
the result of a lower frequency of embedded contexts in dialogue. For abstract
triggers, there were only 28 cases where the triggering expression occurred under at
least one identifiable level of embedding. For definite NPs categorized as new there
were no presuppositional expressions accommodated under embedding. A possible
explanation for this could be that presenting information or ideas using these types
of contexts may be less frequent than concrete references to the past or to the here
and now in informal conversation.
The tendency to accommodate differed greatly by trigger type. Aspectual
verbs, followed by factives, were the most likely to accommodate. On the other
hand, only two presuppositions triggered by too could be interpreted as possible
cases of accommodation. One of these cases was an utterance with too found at the
beginning of a recording where the speakers were already engaged in their
conversation when they entered the room with the recorder. This might mean that
this particular presupposition was not intended to be accommodated and had an
antecedent in the part of the conversation that was not recorded.
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