Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 5
definite NP the woman. Another simplification is the claim that pronouns never
accommodate. There are situations where a pronoun can be used felicitously
without a discourse-given antecedent. Consider the following examples ((21) taken
from Geurts 1999, ex 67).
(21) The doctor kept warning him but he would never listen, and now Harry’s
dead.
(22) Grandma refused to accept it, so I put the money in her purse.
For both examples the pronouns must be accommodated at the time that the
pronoun is reached, an example of cataphora or forward reference. We obtain
enough descriptive information to fully understand the reference later, and this
makes the entire utterance felicitous. Thus it seems that the interpretation of some
pronouns can involve accommodation in their resolution at some point, though
this is a less frequent use of pronouns.
Presuppositions and pronouns differ in that a presuppositional expression
generally signals the semantic type of its referent by its trigger. The semantic type
of the presuppositions of factives and aspectual verbs are pre-determined. In this
way this or that are semantically poorer because you cannot tell from this whether
you are dealing with an abstract object or with a concrete one. But from she or they
you can determine semantic type even though they are pronouns and from this
situation or the woman, you can determine semantic type, even though they contain
relatively little descriptive information.
Still, pronouns in general have less descriptive content than most
presuppositions triggers, and this seems to give us an explanation of why pronouns
do not accommodate well.
If we now consider the non-accommodating triggers, taking too as our
representative, Zeevat (to appear) has argued that van der Sandt’s explanation fails
in that it doesn’t offer a plausible account for why too doesn‘t accommodate.
Following van der Sandt & Geurts (2001), too φ(a) is treated as presupposing
another predicate of the same type as that in the utterance with too, (e.g. the theme,
or φ in the DRS representation), but with a different contrasted element (e.g. the
focus element or x), that may not be identical to the element in the utterance with too
(e.g. a). The form of the presupposition in its alpha-structure is then α[ : φ(x), α[ x :
x ≠ a ]], where [ x : x ≠ a ] is a pronominal element. The presuppositional
expression would seem to have a great deal of descriptive information, yet the
presupposition triggered by too is generally difficult to accommodate and the trigger
isn’t used this way in the corpus either. This is not accounted for in van der Sandt’s
explanation.
Finally, van der Sandt can explain why presuppositions induced by triggers in
the accommodating group can be used felicitously without an antecedent. Factives
induce presuppositions derived from the lexical information in their complements
and this is generally a great deal of descriptive content.
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