Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
In all but two cases at least one potential parallel constituent was found. One
case mentioned earlier where the use of too was at the beginning of a recording,
with little context. This made it difficult to even determine what the theme and focus
were so it is difficult to consider this to be an example of a presupposition that was
intended to be accommodated. The relationship between the antecedent and the
sentence with too seems to be characterized by a very strong mutual dependency,
where we cannot determine what it is that too is meant to be presupposing until after
we have found its antecedent.
The problem with too seems to be that the descriptive content it is associated
with in the utterance where it is triggered can be very different from the descriptive
content that its presupposition will be associated with. The thematic information
must be comparable and the focused elements have to be of the same type, but
beyond these requirements, the descriptive information of the utterance itself
cannot aid much in determining the content of the presupposition. Because of this
too doesn‘t actually serve well as a counter-example to van der Sandt’s explanation
of what licenses accommodation and we could then consider van der Sandt’s
explanation to be correct in that by reanalyzing the presupposition of too we have
been able to account for what seemed to be a counter-example. 16
However, descriptive content alone is not sufficient to license
accommodation in all cases so there are still problems with van der Sandt’s
explanation. Consider the following two examples from Beaver (to appear, p. 41,
examples (29) and (30)).
(40) The 15 year old squirrel ate a biscuit.
(41) Mary is a one-legged Albanian pole vaulter too.
Beaver points out that neither of these examples, despite a great deal of descriptive
content, and despite being very unique, function well at the beginning of a
discourse. Their presuppositions are not easily accommodated. He concludes that
we should rethink the characterization of presupposition and anaphora as being
one phenomena, rather than two. 17
I come to the opposite conclusion. The above examples support the
characterization of presuppositions and anaphors as being of the same kind,
because similar to pronouns, presuppositions can have difficulty accommodating,
and this is regardless of the amount of descriptive content. I believe these cases do
not accommodate well is because there is no link at all with a preceding discourse;
16 Note that the reanalysis of too does not change the predictions for the behavior of
presuppositions triggered by too for Zeevat and Blutner’s account because we still have to
determine what the expression alternatives are for an utterance with too.
17 Beaver writes “…it seems that being a one-legged Albanian pole-vaulter must be sufficiently
rare that the presupposition of the third sentence is highly informative. So why not simply
accommodate a one-legged Albanian pole-vaulter? At present, in order to account for the failure
of accommodation in some cases, a fundamental difference between anaphora and
presupposition must somehow be stipulated in van der Sandt’s model. And this does not sit well
with the intuition that presuppositions and anaphora are not two phenomena, but one.” (p. 42)
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