Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
more moderate in that they accommodate felicitously but they are also used with a
binding interpretation a good deal of the time. There is a distinction between being
able to accommodate felicitously, and the tendency to be used with discourse-new
information that will need to be accommodated by the hearer. For now, I will
concentrate the discussion on the more extreme cases, triggers or anaphoric
expressions that either show both qualities, such as the accommodating triggers, or
lack both qualities, such as pronouns and non-accommodating triggers. If we can
find a plausible account for the behavior of these triggers then we should be able to
later account for the mixed behavior of the remaining triggers more easily. Then we
should also be able to make a clearer distinction between ease of accommodation
and tendency to be used with a resolution that requires accommodation.
Below I discuss the two major proposals in the literature, the descriptive
content explanation of van der Sandt (1992) followed by and the lack of
alternatives explanation of Blutner (2000) and Zeevat (1999, to appear) in relation
to each of these groups, considering both the theoretical observations and the
tendencies in the corpus data. Neither of these explanations can account for all the
data in a satisfying way . Missing from both explanations is a discussion of the role
of context, and the relationship the presupposition has to the context and I’ll relate
this ideda briefly in relation to the corpus data.
5.3.1 Descriptive content licenses accommodation
Van der Sandt (1992) claims that descriptive content makes accommodation
possible. He discusses how presuppositions differ from pronominal anaphors in
that “unlike pronouns they contain descriptive content which enable them to
accommodate an antecedent in case the discourse does not provide one” (p. 344).
Look at the following example. 8
(20) a. [ x : ]
b. [ x : content(x) ]
(20)a represents the generic form of a pronoun in a DRS. It needs to be identified
with another reference marker already in the discourse record in order to get an
interpretation. This given reference marker will already have some sort of
descriptive content associated with it, e.g. there will be something like [ y :
content(y)]] already in the DRS. A presupposition, on the other hand, already has a
form like (20)b. Because it has its own descriptive content, it can create its own
antecedent with which to bind if the discourse record doesn’t provide one.
This is admittedly a simplification of the actual situation. Pronouns often do
contribute some descriptive content, though it is admittedly not very much. For
example, the pronoun she contributes the descriptive content that its referent is
female and the pronoun these contributes the descriptive content that its referent is
plural. The pronoun she therefore contributes the same descriptive content as the
8 This is a simplification of example 44’ given in van der Sandt (1992, p. 359).
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