Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

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Chapter 5 AVOIDACCOMMODATION does more, it makes using assertional means to introduce information preferred over presuppositional means as well. In this way it differs radically from van der Sandt’s explanation in that it compares assertion with presupposition. How this works is best illustrated with an example. Consider the following three sentences as the beginning of a conversation. Suppose a speaker wishes to introduce a new female individual in the discourse. There are then at least three expression alternatives available, a woman, the woman, and she. Each expression alternative could update an empty input context to truth-conditionally equivalent representations, i.e. they will all introduce a reference marker for a female individual in the discourse representation. (23) a. A woman came into my office today and offered me gum. b. ??The woman came into my office today and offered me gum. c. ??She came into my office today and offered me gum. Why are (23)b and (23)c infelicitous as the first sentence in a discourse? The reason given by Zeevat is that they both involve accommodation. The only expression alternative that does not involve accommodation is a woman. The constraint AVOIDACCOMMODATION will penalize she and the woman, as illustrated in Tableau 2, because both require accommodation of a reference marker, therefore the expression that should be generated will be a woman. Tableau 2 intention: refer to a female individual, context: female individual new in the discourse generation: AVOID ACCOMMODATION BESTRONG she *! a woman the woman *! Van der Sandt’s explanation would be that it is the lack of descriptive content in the pronoun and the definite NP that will make these forms difficult to accommodate. Zeevat rejects this explanation. He argues that if lack of sufficient descriptive content is the reason why pronouns do not accommodate, then this suggests that they don’t contribute enough information to introduce a new reference marker in the DRS in a coherent manner. But because a woman above contributes the same descriptive content as her or the woman, the “amount” of descriptive content alone cannot explain the infelicity of introducing a new female reference marker with accommodation, something felt when reading the examples in (23)b and (23)c. If lack of descriptive content is what makes the use of a certain expression incomprehensible, then how can it be that the same amount of information is sufficient for coherently communicating with assertion? There must be something more going on that is preventing accommodation than just a sufficient amount of descriptive content. Zeevat argues that the limitation seen in 122
Accommodation and Presupposition presuppositions has to do with the other alternative expressions available for presenting the same information, which would not require adjusting the input context through accommodation. The existence of these alternatives block certain usages. Interpreters will consider the introduction of information anomalous because they are aware of other generational alternatives that were available to the speaker, e.g. they consider what the speaker could have generated in interpreting what they did generate, a bidirectional perspective. This explanation can in general explain why pronouns and small definite NPs do not accommodate. Note however, that this argument will differ slightly when applied to other pronouns and indefinite NPs, because all indefinites do not have pronominal expression alternatives that contribute the same amount of descriptive information. For example, a car and it are not expression alternatives in the same way, and neither are children and they. Neither pronoun would ever be able to update a context in the same way as the indefinite NP. It seems that expression alternatives differ depending on the intended referent. Zeevat (2000) discusses “non-accommodating alternatives,” that is bound presuppositions, and “non-triggering alternatives,” that is assertional expressions. There will be a preference for binding over accommodation, and assertion over presupposition. If there is no equivalent non-presupposing alternative, then the trigger will support a usage where the presupposed information is accommodated because there is no alternative way to express the same information. Thus, accommodation is licensed by the lack of candidate alternatives that do not require accommodation. In order to consistently apply Zeevat’s account to other examples we need to be able to identify what the expression alternatives are for each presupposition trigger, and this is where the proposal gets into problems. We could consider alternatives to be those generations that, given an input context, will update the discourse in such a way that the output context will be the same for each generation, but where different processes by which the update is made compete, or we could take a broader view and just consider the alternatives that can lead to similar updates without taking the input context into account. The difference in definition of candidate alternatives does not affect the example in Tableau 2, where the alternatives considered were a woman, the woman, and she. Each expression will result in a new reference marker for a female individual being added to the discourse representation, and will also lead to the same interpretation. However, the definition of expression alternatives does crucially affect the predictions of the explanation for the other triggers. Consider the non-accommodating triggers and what happens when we try to apply Zeevat’s and Blutner’s explanation to account for their behavior. We must first identify the expression alternatives to utterances without these triggers. If we take too and also as representatives of this group , as far as I can tell, there do not seem to be any expression alternatives for utterances with these triggers. At least there do not seem to be alternatives that can be said to have the same input context. Consider the following examples: 123
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Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse
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Abstract Naturally produced example
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5.3.2 Lack of expression alternativ
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irrational. Very warm thanks to Jul
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Chapter 1 work about presupposition
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Chapter 1 There are three core char
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Chapter 2 (28) There is a king of F
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Chapter 2 (53) If John has grandchi
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Chapter 2 2.4 THE SATISFACTION THEO
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Data and Method 3 Data and Method E
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Data and Method Speaker B. Speaker
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3.3 THE EXCERPTED EXAMPLES AND ANAL
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Data and Method Additional excerpti
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Accommdation Binding Total number o
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Chapter 4 perceiving the coherence
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Chapter 4 (1) The doctor and the pa
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Chapter 4 (3) Gudrun spent the enti
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Chapter 4 None of the triggered pre
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Chapter 4 Speaker A: Oh no, it‘s
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Chapter 7 behave quite similarly to
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Chapter 7 7.1 FUTURE WORK I strongl
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References Archangeli, D. & D. T. L
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Karttunen, L. (1971), ‘Some obser
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Wilson, D. & T. Matsui (1998), ‘R
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Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

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