Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 2
2.5 briefly outlines several variations of the binding theory that are quite
important. These include Zeevat’s (1992) version, a proposal for treating
presuppositions within Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) by
Asher & Lascarides (1998b) and finally, recent proposals by Blutner (2000) and
Zeevat (1999, to appear) that use a Bidirectional Optimality Theory (Bi-OT)
framework. Each of these proposals is closely related to the binding theory and
they have all been devised to deal with what they see as shortcomings or omissions
in the original formulation of the theory. Because the rest of this work will discuss
some of the same problems in relation to the corpus data as well as the solutions
proposed by these other proposals, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of
their points of view and the ways in which they have modified or extended the
original binding theory.
2.1 HOW DO WE IDENTIFY PRESUPPOSITIONS?
Presuppositions are a special kind of information associated or induced by certain
lexical items and syntactic structures. Consider the following example.
(1) Julia’s bicycle is new. She is glad that it is red.
This example has two presupposition triggering structures, Julia’s bicycle and glad that
p. The first is a possessive noun phrase, that triggers the presupposition that Julia
has a bicycle. The second is a factive adjective with a sentential object complement,
and it presupposes the truth of its sentential complement, i.e. in this case that the
bicycle is red. The easiest and most traditional way to isolate the presupposed
information from the asserted information in a sentence is to negate the sentence.
This is the well-known negation test for presuppositions. The following examples
negate the two sentences given in (1) above:
(2) Julia’s bicycle isn’t new. It is not the case that she is glad that it is red.
From (2) we still infer that that Julia has a bicycle and that the bicycle is red, despite
the fact that both of the sentences are negated. These inferences are called
presuppositions. Earlier characterizations of presuppositions have described them
as inferences that survive negation. We often say that the presupposed information
‘projects out’ of the negated context, that is, it is not interpreted within the scope
of the negation. This is in contrast with asserted information. Consider the
following examples:
(3) Julia’s brother has a bicycle.
(4) Julia’s brother doesn’t have a bicycle.
(3) presupposes that Julia has a brother, triggered by the possessive noun phrase,
and it asserts that he owns a bicycle. But if we negate the sentence as in (4) then the
presupposed information will not be affected by negation but the asserted
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