Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 5
presupposition triggered and on the type of embedding where the triggering
expression occurs.
Before I elaborate more on these ideas I should like to point out that several
researchers have made vague or implicit suggestions that projection may differ
according to the type of embedding. For example, the idea that triggered
presuppositions may have different tendencies to project globally depending on the
type of embedding is implicit in Geurts (2001) who tests both the IP and BP with
presuppositions under different types of embeddings in order to see if there is a
difference. He didn’t find one, but I would argue that one of the reasons may be
because all his examples except one are of definite NPs, i.e. he is testing only one
trigger type.
That the IP makes different predictions depending on the type of
embedding has been used as an argument against it, but this objection is only
relevant if we assume that accommodation preferences will be to the highest level.
If the assumption that higher levels are preferred over lower levels is not
confirmed, we can no longer use the different predictions of the IP as an argument
for dismissing it as an explanation for tendencies in level of accommodation.
Instead we have good reason to look more closely at actual interpretations in the
corpus data to see whether they confirm or disconfirm these different predictions
of the IP. In conclusion, believing that there are different tendencies does not
necessarily mean a rejection of the IP or the BP, but instead that our explanation
will have to account for more heterogenous data.
If there are differences in projection by trigger type, why haven’t we seen
these differences before? This is an important question. I think the answer is that
we have been looking at the wrong type of data, in fact data that could perhaps
never tell us whether or not there is a preference for global accommodation. The
biggest difference between my investigation and the earlier ones I have been
discussing lies in the data that has been examined. In fact, we could reject the
corpus results here and ascribe them to sparse data and to chance – and granted,
the frequency data is slight. Because surely, as has already been shown in chapter 2,
we can take any sentence with any of the presupposition triggers and embed this
sentence under any of the logical operators and we will most likely get an
interpretation where the presupposition projects out, i.e. global accommodation.
But I would say this is just the method that gives us the wrong type of example. We
may unwittingly choose examples with characteristics that make them particularly
suited for being part of the main context when embedded. We then embed them to
see if this changes our interpretation, but the operators that create these
embeddings are applied to examples where the presupposition was already
considered part of the main context. Because the interpreter has already been
exposed to the positive, often declarative version of an unembedded
presupposition. It is not hard to understand that when the sentence is written as a
new version which embeds the presupposed information under some operator that
the tendency will be to continue to treat the presupposed information as something
that was already known, and trying to get a non-presupposing reading then involves
142