Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 5
individual. But this perhaps should be analyzed as binding to something in the
discourse situation. It is unclear how non-linguistic antecedents and binding to
them should be handled in the discourse analysis, but it is clear that this example
cannot be considered a case of pure accommodation. The question is, if and when
too can accommodate without any antecedent at all.
Most of the examples in the literature where it is attempted to show that too
and the other similar triggers are actually able to accommodate are examples that
are “out of the blue” or given without a context. The reason for this is that the
need to bind is so strong, that if too is added to a sentence in a context, it leads to
the immediate identification of several rhetorical relationships that were not
perceived earlier. This can be illustrated with the following example, where Speaker
A is describing the war experiences of an acquaintance to Speaker B, and I have
added a number of too’s which were not in the original text.
(35) (1-10 198)
Speaker A He was invalided out of New Guinea with three kinds of jaundice (too)
two kinds of malaria (too), extensive jungle sores (too). Filthy climate,
dengue fever (too) and a couple of other things to be going along with
and he was in hospital for six months (too) hovering about
the *place* till he made his mind up to come back, you know.
Speaker b Frightful.
Speaker A He weighed six and a half stone when he came out of New Guinea.
He‘s about the same height as me (too), which is not good and you
know you you can duplicate this (too) among . a {lot of middle-aged}
Australians (too)
Speaker b Yes - - it makes for a great great generation gap (too) in this country
(too) at any rate.
Speaker A Well, the generation gap is the same anywhere I think between anyone
who took part in World War Two and people who’ve grown up living on
the fat of the land without any prospect of being conscripted (too)
The example above intends only to show that, given a context, too will find an
antecedent, meaning that its presupposition is underspecified enough to easily find
something to bind with in a rich context.
The too’s in example (35) can obviously be removed. However, in Zeevat (to
appear), Zeevat mentions that he has examined a Dutch novel together with a
student and attempted to remove the Dutch equivalent of too, and that in most
cases the version without the too was an infelicitous alternative. 13 Example (35) is
the opposite of what Zeevat (to appear) did in his study where he removed too’s.
Where does the difference come from? The best explanation I have for this is that
13 We can guess that the examples all were cases of too with antecedents, though Zeevat doesn’t
explicitly mention if the too’s were bound or accommodated. If they were cases of accommodated
too’s then the infelicity experience by the versions without the too would have to be considered
evidence that the version without the particle cannot be considered as real non-presupposing
alternatives.
130