Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
interlinking is something that is necessary for definite NP accommodation. In her
analysis of indefinite and definite NPs in file change semantics (FCS) she only
allows definite NPs to contribute new file cards when they are able to be linked in
some way through their descriptive content with another file card.
Interlinking is probably playing a role in the accommodation of all triggers,
and may in part be what makes accommodated information felicitous and
understandable. We can see evidence of this in many of the examples of
accommodated presuppositions in the corpus, for example the this college referred to
in example (1) in this chapter, as well as for many others. The reader is encouraged
to reexamine the example of accommodation from this chapter. Most of them
contain a number of anaphoric an presuppositional expressions embedded within
them, 18 e.g. Lawrence’s novels in example (3), this in (14), you language person in (15), he
in (16), this in (17), and those continued supply of funds in (18).
The amount of linking that will be possible will differ by trigger type.
Triggers differ greatly in how much structure the presuppositions they induce have,
e.g. definite NPs have less structure than factives. Noun phrases are less likely to be
complex and contain variables, especially bound variables, or to show the type of
interlinking that abstract presuppositions can show. Big definite NPs are often big
because they have additional arguments, sometimes entire restrictive relative
clauses. The more structure a triggered presupposition has the more chance there
will be that it is linked to the give discourse.
In conclusion, neither van der Sandt and Zeevat’s nor Blutner’s account take
the context into consideration in the discussion of what licenses accommodation,
and this means they are unable to explain some cases. The potential to
accommodate is to a certain degree related to inherent features of the triggering
expression, as in van der Sandt’s explanation, or to features of the potential
alternatives to the triggering expression as in Blutner & Zeevat’s explanation. But
the degree to which the presupposed information is linked to the context and the
degree to which alternative interpretations are excluded because of world
knowledge or other pragmatic factors will also play a role how practical and how
felicitous accommodation is.
It still remains to be explained how much linking is enough, so this
explanation suffers from the same problem as van der Sandt’s. I don’t have an
answer to this, and I wonder if it is possible to even give one. In the end,
accommodation is licensed when the resulting discourse is understandable, and this
will vary not with a particular presupposition trigger or a particular presupposition,
but with the context in which a particular presupposition is used. Because of this,
the ability to accommodate easily or felicitously is not an absolute feature of certain
triggers but only a tendency in trigger usage that can be overridden by contextual
information and world knowledge. This means that it will be difficult to make more
than general predictions about when the factors that influence the licensing of
accommodation will actually permit it.
18 I am grateful to Rob van der Sandt for pointing out this pattern in my data.
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