Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
5.3.3.1 Presupposition of Too
The presuppositions triggered by too may not contain the amount of descriptive
information that is currently assumed. 15 Annotating the presuppositions induced by
too was a more complicated task than for other presuppositions in part because the
exact presupposition is not given in the utterance where the trigger too occurs but
will be related to the presupposed information in a predictable way. To increase
reliability, the annotation of the too examples was done by the author on two
separate occasions, as well as by a second native speaker on one occasion. Each
annotation task had two parts, first, the utterance containing too was presented with
a short context and a hypothesis was made about what the presupposition was.
Second, an expanded context was given and the hypothesis about the
presupposition was made again and the utterances where antecedent information
could be found.
Identifying the presupposition from the utterance with too alone, i.e.
identifying what elements were being contrasted, was very problematic. This is
because too can focus any one of several constituents: the subject, the predicate or
part of the predicate, or another constituent making it often difficult to determine
what information was the focus and what was the theme. This variability was first
discussed by Jacobson (1964) and Fjelkestam-Nilsson (1983) has pointed out in her
corpus study of written uses of too that all three types of focusing occur. Too’s
position in the sentence was not a strong clue for identifying the focused
constituent either. Jacobson (1964) classified too as potentially occurring in four
positions relative to the focused constituent: immediately before, immediately
following, or before or after the focused element. Fjelkestam-Nilsson (1983) found
that all combinations were possible and occurred at least once in the data, though
some combinations were more frequent than others so the position can help in
some cases. This variability accounts for the difficulties in both this study and in
Fjelkstam-Nilsson (1983) identifying the contrasted element in the utterance where
too occurs is very difficult when examination is limited to the local environment. An
illustration of this variance is given in (36) (example modified from Fjelkestam-
Nilsson, 1983, p.28). Examples (36)a (36)b, and (36)c, select two different
constituents to be compared and (36)d varies both the focus and the theme.
(36) a. Tom called Mary. John called Mary too.
b. John wrote to Mary. John called Mary too.
c. John called Susanne. John called Mary too.
d. John called Susanne. John wrote Mary too.
On the other hand, determining the focus element is not difficult when the
example is simple and other factors contribute or support one interpretation. See in
(37)a-c .
15 Some of these results and the discussion given here were presented in Spenader (2001a).
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