Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
Global: Signs are the only things you can observe, like things are blocked up and if
you look at an X-ray you see this.
Local: Signs are the only things you can observe. If you take an X-ray then things
are blocked up and you see this.
There is no X-ray before the clause beginning with if. If the X-ray is what permits
us to observe that things are blocked up, then global accommodation does not
seem to be an option. It seems to violate something similar to trapping though not
something that would make a variable unbound explicitly, but perhaps implicitly.
The reason seems to be that the continuation of the sentence is most likely “if you
took and X-ray and saw that things were blocked up in the X-ray.” If this had been
the actual utterance then we would be dealing with trapping (see 2.3.2), but when
the argument is unexpressed seems to result in a kind of implicit trapping. We are
discussing information we can have only by virtue of the reference to an X-ray that
does not exist at the level of the main context. Taking an X-ray is a prerequisite for
seeing that things are blocked up.
The above should have given some idea of the types of examples found in
the corpus, as well as shown some of the difficulties involved in determining the
levels of embedding and the resulting level of accommodation. With these
difficulties in mind we can now use these results, as well as other characteristics of
the corpus examples, when discussing three major questions in relation to
accommodation, what kind of information do speakers use accommodation to
communicate, what is it exactly that licenses accommodation and is there evidence
for the proposed preference for higher levels of accommodation?
5.2 ACCOMMODATED INFORMATION FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE
DISCOURSE PARTICIPANTS
For the majority of examples of accommodated factive presuppositions, the
speaker intentionally wished to communicate information he believed was new to
the hearer. This confirms earlier corpus work on it-clefts (Prince, 1978, Delin 1995)
which pointed out that being presupposed has little to do with the information
status of the presupposed information to the interpreter or what the speaker
believes the interpreter knows.
The numbers in
Table 5 actually say nothing about the information status of the
accommodated information. The figures for accommodation refer to how often
the presupposed information will need to be added to the discourse record because
it has not already been introduced in the discourse. Accommodation roughly shows
the adjustments that need to be made to the representation to make the
presupposed information felicitous, adjustments that should be similar for
participants as well as annotators. In order to say something about what
information status accommodated information has, what functions speakers use
accommodation for, and how hearers understood the information, we have to
109