Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
discourse model they should be assuming. This could be a reason for why
presupposition can present hearer-new information.
The appropriateness of communicating hearer-new information by
accommodation seems to depend heavily on the trigger involved and the context.
Perhaps speakers don’t really care that they are communicating hearer-new
information via presupposition. From the speaker’s perspective, the key is
successful communication of the message. The hearer may have to do some
“repairs” to correctly process this but if the presupposed information is
semantically rich enough that accommodation can proceed without the danger of
misinterpretation on the part of the hearer, then it will be exploited by speakers.
Trigger types seem to differ in the ease with which their induced
presuppositions can be accommodated as well as their tendency be resolved by
accommodation. What underlies these differences, and does it have anything to do
with their appropriateness for communicating hearer-new information? This is the
focus of the next section, which looks more closely at two proposals for explaining
what licenses accommodation and adds some observations from the corpus data.
5.3 WHAT CHARACTERISTICS SUPPORT OR HINDER EASE OR TENDENCY TO
ACCOMMODATE?
In the corpus data we can see that different trigger types displayed very different
tendencies to bind or accommodate. This was predicted already in van der Sandt
(1992) where he writes that “All (these) triggers are anaphoric in the same sense
though they may differ in their capacity to accommodate” (p. 342). Since this paper
Zeevat (to appear) has pointed out that differences in the ease with which triggers
accommodate are not treated systematically, if at all, in the satisfaction theory, or
the binding theory and its variations. In this section I’ll discuss what characteristics
license accommodation, and what characteristics play a role in tendency to be
accommodated. There are two proposed explanations: van der Sandt (1992) relates
the ability to accommodate to the amount of descriptive content a presupposition
has and Zeevat (1999) and Blutner (2000) argue that a lack of alternative
expressions that do not need accommodation licenses accommodation.
There are three groups of expressions that behave differently and whose
differences should be accounted for in any proposal that claims to explain what
licenses accommodation. The first group is the class of traditional anaphors,
represented by pronouns. Any explanation about the licensing of accommodation
in the binding theory, or its variations, should explain this class doesn’t
accommodate. The Binding Theory treats anaphora as a subset of presupposition
so they should have some explanation for why pronouns behave differently in this
regard. 6
6 I suppose an explanation as to why pronominal anaphora don‘t accommodate is unnecessary
for versions of the satisfaction theory because these theories don‘t treat anaphora and
presupposition in the same way.
117