Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 2
Julia doesn’t have a brother from the set of worlds where Julia bakes cookies,
rather than removing it first from all the world, and then taking only the worlds
where Julia bakes cookies.
In some examples the presupposition is related to the information in the
antecedent of the conditional. For these examples some researchers have argued
(Beaver, 1992, to appear) that a conditional presupposition is actually the correct
prediction, and they have argued that the binding theory fails in that it can’t
account for these conditional presuppositions, for example:
(59) If Fred is a scuba diver, then he will bring his wet suit. 15
Here it seems that it is more likely that we want a conditionalized presupposition,
that is that Fred has a wet suit is contingent on him being a scuba diver. However,
these counterexamples all seem to share an intuition that there is a potential
entailment relationship or an anaphoric relationship between the antecedent and
the presupposition, and that this relationship makes the presupposition already
satisfied in the antecedent, preventing the presupposition from being globally
accommodated.
Intermediate accommodation is also a problem for the satisfaction theory
because in this theory there is no mechanism for representation. For example,
consider how updating proceeds with a conditional of the form S 1 → S 2{p}. If the
presupposition needs to be accommodated in the antecedent of the conditional we
run into problems. According to the update rules given in (55), c+[ S 1 → S 2{p}] is
the same as c – ( c+[ S 1 ] – c+[ S 1 ] [ S 2{p}]). First, the context is updated with
the information in S 1 , i.e. c+[ S 1]. This results in a context we can call c’. Now
our expression is c – ( c’–c’+[ S 2{p}]) and our next step is to update c’ with [
S 2{p}], i.e. c’+[ S 2{p}]. But first we have to make sure that the presupposition p is
satisfied. Because we began with an empty context, we will need to accommodate
p. 16 Local accommodation would be possible because we could revise the second c’
to one that satisfies p. But there is no context in our current expression that can be
revised to result in intermediate accommodation. For intermediate accommodation
we need to “back up” to the second c in our original expression, i.e.: c –
(c+p+[ S 1 ] – (c+[ S 1 ][ S 2{p}]) ) But because contextual update proceeds
incrementally we will never know if we need to intermediately accommodate until
after we have made a contextual revision that prevents intermediate
accommodation. That is, at the point in time where we realize that we need
intermediate accommodation our expression is c – ( c’–c’+[ S 2{p}]). And because
we don’t keep a derivational history (which would in effect be a level of
representation, something CCS argues is unnecessary) we can’t get back to the
15 This example is from Geurts (1999), p. 97, and he attributes it to Manfred Krifka.
16 If p had been part of the information in S1 then p would already be satisfied.
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