Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Data and Method
3 Data and Method
Existing work on presupposition has mainly dealt with made-up examples that
could illustrate their logical properties. Looking at naturally produced examples in a
context yields new information about well-known difficulties and presenting some
previously unseen problems. Also, presuppositions are a context-dependent
phenomenon and using spoken corpus data in particular has the tangible advantage
that it allows the communicative effect of the use of a presupposition to be gauged
by observing the linguistic reactions of the other discourse participants.
Currently, there is very little corpus work on presuppositions, and most of it
has been on written discourse. The only corpus studies I am aware of have focused
on it-clefts (Prince, 1978; Delin, 1995; Collins, 1991) and definite NPs (Fraurud,
1990, Poesio & Vieira, 1998), though few of these studies have looked at these
items from a presuppositional perspective and only two of these looked at spoken
language examples (Collins 1991, Prince 1978) Also, almost all of this research was
done before the development of the binding theory, and none of the work
evaluates the idea of treating presuppositions as anaphors.
In this chapter I introduce the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English
(LLC) from which the corpus examples in the study were taken, including
information about the corpus, how it was collected and the type of annotation that
is available with it. Studying transcripts of multi-speaker discourse is not completely
straightforward. There are interruptions, unclear syntactic structure, and
overlapping speech, all of which complicate analysis. Some examples have to be
excluded because it is impossible to analyze them in a satisfactory way based on
information in the transcript alone. But I think the advantages outweigh the
difficulties. In the concluding section I present how these difficulties will be dealt
with as well as details of the discourse segmentation, and prosodic features coded
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