Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 5
default intonation also generally suggests that the presupposed information is
background information to the assertional information, which is concerned with
who knows what, with what degree of certainly. Geurts (2001) may be on the right
track in arguing that the notion of presupposed information as background
information is somehow related to preferences for accommodation, because in
decontextualized examples intonation suggests that presupposition is shared
information and shared information will prefer to be globally accommodated. This
tendency to be shared information is not uniform for all trigger types, or even for
all presuppositions induced by triggers within the same group. For example, the
above examples do not work as well when the factive is notice or realize, something
that should perhaps be addressed in more detail, but I hope that the examples
above suffice to show that default intonations for decontextualized examples may
give misleading intuitions about what type of readings are available, or are most
natural.
On the other hand, from section 5.2 we saw that many of the accommodated
factives were used to communicate hearer-new information, though the majority of
these examples were not embedded. In the following example, the presupposition
will not be globally accommodated because it would lead to an inconsistent global
context.
(48) John is a baptist and a bachelor. He is convinced that his wife has to be a
baptist too. That’s why he only dates girls from church socials.
In conclusion, the type of data we examine is crucial when trying to make
conclusions about preferences. Using only data that has been removed of its
contextual links is going to give us an incomplete picture of the situation. Examples
in theoretical work on presupposition do show that global accommodation is
preferred, but because these are decontextualized examples this sample is
somewhat skewed.
In the corpus there are differences in tendencies for different triggers to be
induced under embedding, regardless of the level of accommodation, though
admittedly the number of examples is quite small. The main types of embeddings
are negation, conditionals, hypothetical or modal contexts.
First we can ask if all logical operators create embeddings that affect
anaphoric accessibility in the same way. I don’t believe negation produces the same
type of embedded context that other operators do and there is a higher tendency
for global accommodation under negation than under other operators. Things
embedded under negation do not exist. Generally, we don’t discuss at length nonexistent
things when we don’t accept their existence. We do however discuss at
length hypothetical states of affairs, objects, etc. Therefore I believe information
introduced under modal embeddings, and if-then clauses will have a greater ability to
play an independent role in these embeddings than information introduced in the
scope of a negation operator, and this will affect tendencies to project out.
144