Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
5.1.3 Intermediate and Local Accommodation
For the majority of the examples that were accommodated locally or intermediately,
global accommodation was ruled out either because it would be epistemically
indefensible or because a discourse referent within the embedded context is either
explicitly or implicitly referred to in the presuppositional expression, i.e. cases of
trapping.
It was mentioned in section 2.4 that the satisfaction theory has difficulties
representing intermediate accommodation. If corpus linguistic evidence shows that
we need a concept of intermediate accommodation to correctly interpret naturally
produced examples, we would have an additional argument for preferring the
binding theory. In order for intermediate accommodation to be a potential
interpretation the utterance containing the trigger will need to have at least three
contexts to accommodate in.
Unfortunately, in many complex cases it is difficult to determine if and
where embedded contexts begin and end. This made it difficult not only to
determine if intermediate accommodation was possible but also to determine what
the meaning of each reading would be at each potential level of accommodation
with the different embedded contexts. Therefore I was unable to evaluate this claim
in relation to the corpus data. Additionally, it does not seem very meaningful
beyond the level of individual examples to know frequencies for intermediate
accommodation contrasted with local accommodation. The important question
about the behavior of presuppositions under embedding has to do with global
versus intermediate or local accommodation, but it is not important for these
discussions how deep in the embedding accommodation actually was.
The following example is representative of about half of the locally
accommodated factives. Only global and local accommodation are options because
it is clear that there is only one logical operator creating a level of embedding, the
negation.
(4) factive, triggered p: I am going to be a vast amount of help to you (LOCAL)
(2-2a 16)
Speaker A: But I don‘t really know that I‘m going to be a vast amount of help to you.
The induced presupposition here is “I am going to be a vast amount of help to
you.” This is embedded under negation. Global accommodation would result in the
speaker presupposing that he is going to be a vast amount of help but then denying
knowing about this. This analysis is epistemically indefensible; the speaker cannot
presuppose a fact that he then denies knowing about. Therefore we must locally
accommodate in the negated context. There were 5 cases of this specific structure
among the factives, all examples where the subject of the matrix sentence is the
speaker, and the matrix sentence is a present tense negated factive verb. This type
of example is also well known from the theoretical literature (see Gazdar (1979),
Kiparsky & Kiparsky (1970)). In order to correctly analyze them we need to add a
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