Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 7
7.1 FUTURE WORK
I strongly believe that we need to look at more empirical data because we still know
so little about the actual use of presuppositions. While I believe that this work has
made a contribution to our knowledge, I also see many unanswered questions.
There were fewer triggered presuppositions in the corpus data than expected
and therefore the fewer examples of each type of resolution than what would have
been ideal for making strong conclusions. Analyzing individual examples demands
an examination of the entire previous discourse context, thus looking at more data
will be a time-consuming task. Just the same, several of the questions discussed in
this work could have been answered more satisfactorily if we had had more cases
to look at. For example, it is not clear how frequently bound presuppositions
appear in long-distance relationships with potential antecedents. In the data there
was only one example of a long-distance binding relationship identified as such on
the basis of the reaction of the other discourse participants, e.g. example (22) in
chapter 4, section 4.3.3. It would be desirable to have several more similar
examples to know if this is a common occurrence with presupposition or if this
particular case was special. Our understanding of many of the issues concerning
accommodation raised in section 5.5 would greatly benefit from addition naturally
produced data. The existence of a preference for higher levels of accommodation
could be discussed in more detail if we had more examples of embedded
presuppositions. Such examples would enable us to more closely examine each type
of embedding as well as more examples of accommodation at different levels.
However, without more naturally occurring examples, any discussion of the effect
of different types of embedding on presuppositions projection is mere speculation.
The conducting of annotation task experiments would yield a more precise
characterization of the interpretation of presupposed information, and tell us to
what degree this interpretation is dependent on the individual interpreter. In this
work, an annotation task was done with the definite NPs, and the annotation of
too was in a more informal way confirmed by a second annotator. A more
constrained annotation of a balanced set of examples of each trigger type with
more annotators would be helpful.
Finally, it was beyond the ambitions of this study to look at the influence of
prosody on the interpretation of presupposed material, but this is definitely an issue
that should be examined more closely, either by analyzing recorded data to see how
naturally produced prosodic forms of utterances are realized, or by doing listening
experiments. Prosodic prominence could be varied on different parts of utterances
with presupposition triggers given in a neutral context. This would show the extent
to which prosodic information can influence the interpretation of presupposition.
In particular, looking at the relationship between presupposition triggered under
embedding and the placement of pitch accent in the utterance would be helpful for
understanding preferences for level of accommodation. This type of study is also
necessary for developing speech synthesis systems that incorporate presupposition.
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