Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 5
problematic is because it involves introducing a new OT constraint in order to
make the explanation work for one type of NP. This seems a little unsystematic.
Either expression alternatives inhibit accommodation or other factors must play a
role in all triggered presuppositions.
Zeevat discusses another counter-example to the lack of alternatives as an
explanation, one pointed out by Geurts and having to do with the expression
manage. 11 Examine the following examples.
(31) Jennifer managed to finish her dissertation.
(32) Jennifer finished her dissertation.
Example (31) is said to presuppose that Jennifer had some difficulty in finishing her
dissertation. It has a simple, non-presupposing alternative, the same utterance but
without the manage as in (32). Both could be used in similar input contexts. But the
utterance with the triggered presupposition can easily be accommodated, even
though there is an expression alternative. Zeevat (to appear) concludes that this
example suggests that truth-conditional equivalence is too weak a criterion for
determining expression alternatives. Instead we need to find alternatives that
display a “psychological identity.” Unfortunately, Zeevat does not discuss how
psychologically identical expressions could be identified.
Psychologically equivalence may be needed to identify alternatives to account
for why manage can accommodate but it doesn’t help much with the other triggers.
Changing meaning equivalence, which was already problematic because it is not
clear how this should be defined with respect to the input context, doesn’t get
easier because we change to a definition of psychological equivalence. In contrast,
we would have to conclude that too and the other triggers in the nonaccommodating
group certainly do not have a psychologically equivalent expression.
This is most clearly seen by taking cases where too or also are bound and removing
them, where something is immediately lost. This “something” seems to be the
speaker’s attitude to the information, or how the speaker feels the information
rhetorically relates or coherently fits in with the rest of the discourse, even if theses
alternatives would seem to be truth-conditionally equivalent. I am not sure how to
evaluate the psychological equivalence of alternatives such as indefinites, pronouns
and definites, but because it would be a stricter definition than the one we were
using, it would seem to cause more problems then it solves.
Zeevat recognizes that there are problems with the predictions made by
AVOIDACCOMMODATION. For this reason, he discusses a weaker alternative
constraint called Obligatory Triggers Do Not Accommodate. Because this
constraint refers exclusively to obligatory triggers, it excludes many of the
problematic counter examples to the stronger theorem. Some triggers seem to be
11 It is not at all clear that manage is a presupposition trigger. When the PTB is applied it does
project, but it is very difficult to make up natural examples where it will bind.
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