Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 5
requirement to accommodation which says that the result of accommodating the
presupposition must be an epistemically defensible discourse.
Note that changing these examples so that the subject of the factive is no
longer the speaker, as done in (5), or changing the tense of the verb so that it is no
longer present tense, makes global accommodation preferred. Embedding an
example like (4) under a modal operator, will also make global accommodation
preferred, as illustrated in (6).
(5) John doesn’t really know that he is going to be a vast amount of help to you.
(6) I might not know that I am going to be a vast amount of help to you.
The preferred interpretation of (5) globally accommodates the presupposition, and
it will mean something like “John isn‘t aware that he will be a vast amount of help
to you.” This is because the speaker and the subject are no longer the same
individual, and there is no longer a conflict between the information presupposed
by the speaker and the beliefs attributed to the subject of the factive.
Trapping, and a phenomena similar to trapping, were the main causes of
presupposed information being prevented from projecting out of embedded
contexts. These are cases where the presupposed proposition triggered in an
embedded context contains as an argument a reference marker that was also just
introduced within that embedded context, making it impossible for the
presupposed proposition to be accommodated higher than the context where the
reference marker was introduced because the argument would then become
unbound.
(7) aspectual verb, triggered p: A pattern is not working at time t-1 (LOCAL)
(1-2@ 649)
Speaker A: When we‘ve got a bit more [inf] information, and if we‘ve seen a
patterntrapped referent that begins to work [@m] With [@m] with an
Austrian university
In (7), Speaker A and another (not shown) are discussing setting up a program or
research cooperation between their university and universities abroad. Whether the
program will become reality or not is still unclear and they are at the planning stage
at the time of the discussion. Up until the sentence and if we’ve seen a pattern they are
discussing which Italian universities would make possible partners and that the
pattern would have to first work with these universities. After this, something else
will be implemented with and Austrian University. Here it is necessary to read a great
deal of the previous context to understand that the pattern referred to is a
discussion of how the exchange will work in practice between their university and
the Italian universities.
This becomes a case of trapping because the presupposed state that could be
described as ‘a pattern is not working earlier’ contains a reference a pattern, whose
reference marker is introduced in the context created by the if-clause. Global
accommodation would make the discourse undefined because the reference marker
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