Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 5
The second group is made up of traditional triggers that induce
presuppositions which do not accommodate easily. This group of triggers is
includes the group of non-referential anaphoric triggers identified by Zeevat (to appear)
which includes too, even, again, German wieder (again), and several Dutch particles,
e.g. inderdaad, wel, toch, immers as well as the conjunction + particle omdat immers. 7
Particles like too, also, and even have been identified by many researchers as inducing
presuppositions that are difficult to accommodate (e.g. Stalnaker 1974, Kripke, ms).
The only member from this group that was studied in the corpus was too, whose
presuppositions were almost exclusively bound. For convenience I will call this
group the non-accommodating group of presupposition triggers. The nonaccommodating
group could also be thought of in a more positive way as things
that prefer to bind, i.e. they prefer to be anaphoric. Tendency to bind could then be
described as related to the need to access or retrieve descriptive content for
interpretation.
The third group is made up of traditional triggers that seem to induce
presuppositions that have little or no trouble accommodating. Obvious members
of this group are the ones induced by factives and big definite NPs, i.e. NPs
modified by adjectives, relative clauses or in some cases prepositional phrases.
Evidence that this third group accommodates easily comes from the well known
examples in the theoretical literature on presuppositions, some of which are
presented in (19) with the presupposition trigger in bold. From these examples we
can see that factives like regret and point out, the focus particle almost, possessives and
big definite NPs can be used felicitously by a speaker to add discourse-new
information to a context (taken from Karttunen, 1974, p. 191, example 26).
(19) a. We regret that children cannot accompany their parents to
commencement exercises.
b. There are almost no misprints in this book.
c. I would like to introduce you to my wife.
d. John lives in the third brick house down the street from the post
office.
e. It has been pointed out that there are counter examples to my theory.
The high frequency of accommodation in the corpus data presented here for
factives, as well as for big definite NPs presented in the corpus work of Poesio &
Vieira (1998), also confirm that the triggers in this group induce presuppositions
that tend to need to be accommodated.
Two types of triggers, aspectual verbs and it-clefts, were studied in the
corpus but weren’t mentioned as members of any of the three groups, e.g. small
definite NPs, i.e. NPs with only an article and head noun, aspectual verbs, it-clefts.
These triggers can all trigger presuppositions that can accommodate easily, but
were not overwhelmingly used this way in the corpus. In this way these triggers are
7 Zeevat (to appear) says inderdaad is similar in meaning to indeed, wel is similar to emphatic do,
toch could be translated as after all, immers is similar to as you know, and omdat immers is
approximately equivalent to because as you know….
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