Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Accommodation and Presupposition
In summary, the assumption that higher levels of accommodation will be
preferred over lower levels cannot be well motivated by using decontextualized
examples, nor have any of the theoretical explanations for this proposed preference
been entirely convincing. The corpus results supply, albeit weak, support for an
alternative proposal that tendencies to accommodate at different levels has to do
with the tendency for a trigger to occur under certain types of embedding, the
function of the presupposition trigger, and in some cases its relation to the asserted
information associated with the trigger and the ability of the presupposed
information to be the focus of the message communicated. An explanation along
these lines could perhaps relate tendency to be accommodated globally with
tendency to communicate hearer-new information. These ideas can certainly be
developed more, but I hope I have convinced the reader to entertain at least the
possibility of an alternative to the proposed general preference for higher levels of
accommodation.
5.5 SUMMARY
This chapter discussed the conditions for accommodation; when it can occur, how
it occurs and why it is used. These questions have been discussed in the literature in
reference to made up examples. Here I tried to related them to the corpus data and
use it as a basis to discuss three theoretical questions in presupposition theory.
The first question discussed dealt with how often presuppositions were used
to present hearer-new information, and looked more closely at the use of factive
verbs in the corpus. It seems that factive verbs are used the majority of the time to
present information that the speaker believes is new to the hearer.
The second question discussed was what licenses accommodation for
presuppositions, and what prevents it in traditional anaphors. The two main
explanations in the literature, van der Sandt‘s (1992) account based on descriptive
content, and Blutner’s and Zeevat‘s proposal that it has something to do with the
availability of non-presupposing alternatives, were both shown to be unable to
account for all of the data in a convincing way. There were also great differences in
what explanation worked for which trigger which suggests that the licensing of
accommodation is a much more heterogeneous phenomena than it is perhaps
portrayed. Context also plays a large role in the felicitousness of accommodation,
and we can see that accommodated presuppositions were often linked to the
discourse record in the corpus examples.
The third question discussed was the proposed preference for presupposed
information to be accommodated at the highest level possible. I point out that the
proposed preference is not entirely supported by the corpus data, and that current
explanations still do not adequately account for why this preference should hold.
Instead, I argue that there is no general preference for global accommodation that
applies to all triggers and under all types of embedding, and that while
presupposition triggers all have the same potentials they are not are functionally
used with all their potentials and that this is in part due to their semantic types, the
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