Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
didn’t used to do something, someone is still doing something. They are not used
to introduce new topical information. The following example illustrates that these
presuppositions are background information, not focus.
(50) aspectual verb, triggered p: He (cousin of Speaker B) was writing his thesis
earlier (MAINACC) (2-10 991)
Speaker B: I have a cousin a bit like you actually. he used to throw his children
bananas to eat . when they were hungry yes (a)
Speaker c: *[gjum] ( - - - laughs)* (b)
Speaker B: Just casually toss a banana, to a three month old child - tossed
across the room, carry on writing his thesis (laughs). It was an
absolute pigsty. (c)
There is an interesting contrast between example as (49) and (50). In example (49),
the presupposed information is central, it is what is being communicated, the topic
of the conversation. In example (50) the presupposition and even the asserted
information is peripheral to the main story, tossing bananas. Even if we had known
that the cousin was for example a graduate student, we would still need to globally
accommodate the background information for this specific story. I think this is
showing us something about the difference in function between the two triggers.
Accommodated aspectual verbs are general information that is backgrounded to
the main topic, but accommodated factives are generally foreground information.
Consider also the impossibility of aspectual verbs being used to communicate
opinions.
It is difficult to see how we could ever phonetically focus the presupposition
of aspectual verbs because the actual presupposition is calculated from the
triggering expression and none of it is a surface structure that is copied or moved
like with factives. Prosodic prominence in the form of what is often termed pitch
accent is generally considered in English to be a way to signal that information is
focused, and when added to decontextualized examples generally suggests that the
information associated with it is new, important, or foregrounded. The effect of
phonetic focus on the surface form of the trigger can only carry over to the
induced presupposition if the presupposition is derived from some part of the
surface form. But because there is no part of the surface form of aspectual
presuppositions is repeated in the induced presupposition, phonetic focus has no
effect. The same is true of lexical presuppositions.
For it-clefts I think their function plays more of a role in their tendency to
occur under embedding and to be resolved via global accommodation. The form of
it-clefts supports a correction function. This function also influences the way
presuppositions induced by it-clefts contribute to the discourse. Presuppositions
induced by it-clefts were bound a third of the time, a much higher frequency than
the other abstract presuppositional triggers. When the presupposed material was
bound, the antecedent was usually in the proceeding utterance. This high frequency
of binding seems to be related to this correction function. In the bound cases,
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