Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 5
were discarded. For each example of an abstract object anaphor, the relation
between the potential antecedent, if there was one, and discourse structure was
examined, noting speaker shifts between antecedent and anaphor, distance, in
utterances, and any other potentially relevant aspects. The results are presented in
the table below. 9
126
Bound Accommodated
Abstract
Anaphors
Object
Object
complement
28 81 20
Subject
complement
0 0 14
Totals 28 81 34
Table 8 Abstract Object Anaphors, Bound Presuppositions and
Accommodated presuppositions
The 28 bound presuppositions and the 34 abstract object anaphors together make a
total of 62 cases of assertional or bound alternatives, versus 81 cases of
accommodation. This means that factive verbs in the corpus occur with full
propositional presuppositions that need to be accommodated more than half the
time (56%), and as we saw in the section 5.2, a great number of these are examples
where the presupposed information is believed by the speaker to be new to the
hearer.
If we define expression alternatives relative to input contexts, then bound
factive presuppositions and abstract anaphoric reference are not alternatives to
accommodated factive presuppositions. Therefore there doesn’t seem to be an
expression alternative to factive presuppositions and the proposal correctly predicts
that factives should accommodate easily. But if we loosen the input context
requirement and make bound presuppositions and abstract object anaphors
alternatives, then the explanation incorrectly predicts that factives should not
accommodate well and we need another explanation for why over half of the
corpus examples were factives that had to be accommodated.
9 The forms of abstract object anaphora used may also be of interest, but note that no special
patterns were observed among the characteristics. There were 8 cases of it, 2 cases of this, 18
cases of that and 3 cases of zero anaphora and 2 cases of definite noun phrases. For almost all
examples a linguistic expression that could be a source for an abstract object could be found in
the previous discourse segment, or in the same discourse segment, though there were a few
exceptions. In 19 cases the same speaker who uttered the abstract object anaphor also had said
the linguistic expression from which its antecedent can be derived; in 12 remaining cases the
speakers were different, and in 3 cases it is impossible to pinpoint exactly what utterance(s)
provided the antecedent are (cf. Eckert & Strube who also found a great number of vague or
difficult to identify abstract anaphoric occurrences), though it is clear that it is part of the
previous context (e.g. previous or same discourse segments), it is often (as illustrated in example
(3)) a question of determining how much of the previous context is intended as the antecedent