Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Conclusions and Implications
anaphors, or with any of the additional functions present with bound abstract
presuppositions.
In chapter 4, I proposed that some of the difficulties involved in
determining an antecedent may require a framework that can model partial
information more explicitly, so that information from the same induced
presupposition could be resolved in different ways. This could increase the
accuracy of our model of the hearer’s interpretation process for these kind of
examples. But as pointed out in the discussion in section 4.5, without a clearer
understanding of how this should be determined, it will only complicate matters to
attempt to apply it to naturally produced data. More systematic theoretical work on
guidelines is a necessary prerequisite to be able to analysis to naturally produced
data along these lines.
Some work in this direction is found in Kamp & Rossdeutscher (1994),
where they speak of the process of “presupposition justification.” They believe that
the reality of presupposition usage is probably a combination of resolution
techniques rather than the idealized picture where examples can be identified as
resolvable by just binding or only resolvable by accommodation. Blutner (2000)
also hints at some ideas for modifying OT to integrate partial resolutions in his Bi-
OT treatment. His suggestion is that the different constraints that govern
preferences for accommodation and binding could be weighted in some way, so
that instead of taking absolute values or counting the number of reference markers
accommodated, we could make more precise measurements. This would allow us
to consider a greater number of output alternatives for interpretation because we
could look at a higher level of detail. As the theory works now, distinctions are not
made between resolutions where part of the descriptive information can be bound
and the rest cannot, or where the entirety of the presupposed material must be
accommodated. If changes of this type could be made then we would likely be able
to analyze presupposed information in such a way that distinguishes between
resolutions that are more or less context dependent.
Some of the discussion has touched on when and why speakers might
choose to use a presuppositional expression instead of another expression, e.g. in
discussions about speakers’ intentional production of presuppositions in cases
where they could have chosen an anaphoric expression instead, as in chapter 4 or
where they could have chosen an expression alternative that communicated the
same information via assertion or via a bound presupposition, as in chapter 5.
Presupposition generation is a neglected area. This is unfortunate because
generational constraints may actually come into play more often than we perhaps
first realized. The binding theory is written from the perspective of the
interpretation and many of the problem examples in the literature are cases of nonwell
formed structures that need to be explained from the perspective of
production. Researchers working in bidirectional OT may be on the right track, in
that a full understanding of the function of presuppositions, and their
interpretation, needs to take their generation into account.
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