Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
for a pattern wouldn‘t be accessible from a DRS higher than this clause. There could
be a potential for intermediate accommodation if you consider the if as creating a
new embedded context within the whole discussion which is signaled at the
beginning as a hypothetical discussion. However, it is very difficult to determine
exactly what the difference in interpretation between a reading with intermediate
accommodation and a reading with local accommodation, just as it is difficult to tell
where the embedded contexts begin and end. The following example also
illustrates trapping.
(8) factive, triggered p: Somebody is a celebrated striker (LOCAL)(2-14 792)
Speaker C: Well I only hear from Barry# but . all I hear# the difficulties of
sacking people# in this country today .#|
Speaker b: I don‘t think you‘d have a hope in hell of sacking him *Pen*~|
Speaker C: *they‘ve* got to rape the manager‘s daughter at least twice#|
Speaker b: It might be - that if you knew that somebody was a celebrated striker -
you might try hard not to employ him.
Speaker A: I think it may be something like this# but having got him# and he was
perhaps sacked for something else - but I do not know# or made
redundant or something#*- anyway# this is what* he says#|
Speaker C *[mhm] - -# *~|
Here the hypothetical situation is marked very clearly with surface clues such as it
might be and if as well as what seems to be an impersonal or generic you. The
presupposition is embedded in at least one context within the main discourse
context. However it is not clear that all the signals such as if and it might be, which
we would consider natural language equivalents of operators are actually
functioning as such and creating more than one embedded context. If we take both
expressions to be operators which create embedded contexts, our DRS could be
written in the following way, using the simplified notation for factive
presuppositions used in Beaver (1997). 3
(9) a. [ : ◊ [ : [ x : gen_you(x), [ y : knows(x,[ : celebrated_striker(y)]),
α[ z : celebrated_striker(z)] ] ⇒ […]].
b. [ : ◊ [ : [ x : gen_you(x), [ y : celebrated_striker(y),
knows(x,[ : celebrated_striker(y) ] ) ] ⇒ […]].
Because the presuppositional expression itself introduces a reference marker
(somebody) the induced presupposition becomes trapped. This reference marker will
not be accessible outside the modal context. Examine the example in (10) below.
3 In the notation used above gen_you(x) stands for generic you, to be interpreted similarly to
somebody, and the complement of the factive verb is represented as a DRS. Factive
presuppositions should probably be treated by using propositional discourse markers. To do this
we need to extend standard DRT. A detailed proposal for this is found in Asher (1993) and a
relatively conservative extension is presented in Geurts (1999).
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