Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Conclusions and Implications
7 Conclusions and implications
By now the importance of complementing theoretical work in semantics and
pragmatics with the study of naturally produced examples in context should be
clear. Many of the results presented in this work could not have been obtained
without looking at corpus data in detail.
One of the most helpful aspects of using corpus data is that it provides
examples that have a naturally produced context. The interpretation of
presuppositional expressions is context dependent, whether they are bound or
accommodated, so having examples with a rich context helps in understanding
these examples better. Equally important is the context following the use of a
presuppositional expression. Without this latter information, little can be said about
the effects of the presupposed information, about speaker intentions, hearer
interpretation, and about how the presuppositional expression contributes to the
communicative goals of the participants.
For example, many of the cases of bound presuppositions in chapter 4 that
were argued to have discourse functions are generally not the type of made-up
examples we see in most semantics literature. Without having examined the
bridging examples in context I could not have seen the difficulty involved in using
current theoretical assumptions of a single anchor. To do empirical work it is
necessary to have a theoretical base. Many of the phenomena or uses of
presuppositions that I found in the corpus deserve to be discussed in a more
precise way on their own using a set of systematically chosen made-up examples.
However, I would not have been able to make several observations without access
to the corpus.
The binding theory argues that presuppositional expressions are anaphoric
expressions, and one of the claims of chapter 4 is that bound presuppositions
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