Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
(1) factive, triggered p: Everybody else in the college was using (visual aids) all
the time. (MAINACC) (2-11b 1306), four participants.
Speaker A: but if you‘re doing *them* by all the International House things and - sort
of - drills and all this all this business or did you just sort of do it (a)
Speaker d: oh well I could remember some of them . the drill things~| (b)
Speaker A: yes. (c)
Speaker d: And a few more of them came back and I gradually realized that
everybody else in this college was using them all the time. You know,
visual aids, prompts, this sort of lark. (d)
Speaker A: Horrors (e)
Speaker d: Situations (f)
(2) aspectual verb, triggered p: He (cousin of Speaker B) was writing his thesis
earlier (MAINACC) (2-10 991)
Speaker B: I have a cousin a bit like you actually. he used to throw his children
bananas to eat . when they were hungry yes (a)
Speaker c: *[gjum] ( - - - laughs)* (b)
Speaker B: Just casually toss a banana, to a three month old child - tossed
across the room, carry on writing his thesis (laughs). It was an
absolute pigsty. (c)
For both examples, binding was ruled out as a potential interpretation. There are
no utterances that communicate the same or similar information in the context. In
example (1), Speaker A acknowledges Speaker d’s utterance and therefore also the
presupposition. The presupposition may only be partially resolvable until line (d)
where Speaker d clarifies what reference was intended for the pronoun them in his
last utterance of that line. In the discourse from which example (1) is taken there is
nothing said about other college employees using visual aids or other types of
International House type drills.
In example (2) there is no information that the subject of Speaker B’s
utterance had been working on a thesis prior to the time of the utterance. This is
also marked rather explicitly in Speaker B’s utterance in line (a), e.g. “I have a
cousin”, suggesting that Speaker c probably isn’t aware even of the existence of the
individual. The conversation from which example (2) was taken was between four
participants, including Speaker B’s spouse (no utterances shown above) and it is
conceivable that this individual may have already known about the cousin and his
habits, but because Speaker B seems to be addressing his/her story to Speaker c, it
seems to be information that the speaker believes is hearer-new. Note that neither
of these presuppositions could be considered unexpected or predictable
information.
5.1.2 Global Accommodation
The examples categorized as GLOBAL accommodation in the table were
presuppositions triggered in an embedded context but were accommodated in the
main DRS, formerly considered presuppositions that were projected. This group is
103