Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Data and Method
the communicative role we want to attribute to them given the processing
limitations and memory limitations present in spoken discourse. Speakers may need
to be more conservative in their estimation of what is salient to listeners at the time
of speaking, unlike writers who can count on earlier statements being available for
looking up in the earlier context if the reader should need to refer to them.
Second, we can really say something about the function of presuppositions
by seeing how they dynamically contribute to communication in a setting where
there is also a receiver that can react to the information. Looking at written work
we can only take our reaction into account, whereas by looking at spoken dialogue
we can immediately observe the reaction of the other participants in their linguistic
behavior and make conclusions as to whether or not this communication was
successful. It is this ability to see the reaction and counter-reaction to utterances
that induce presuppositions that allows us to see if the presupposed material in
context has achieved the communicative effect we would theoretically attribute to it
in isolation. This is what makes spoken dialogue so exciting for studying
presupposition.
3.2 THE LONDON LUND CORPUS
The corpus study was done using the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English.
This is a computerized transcribed corpus of spoken British English that grew out
of a joint project between the University College of London and Lund University
The LLC is composed of 100 spoken texts that were collected as part of the Survey
of English Usage (SSE) and it is publicly available. 1 The corpus was recorded for
the most part surreptitiously either at the University, or in the homes of some of
the members involved in the project. See Svartvik (1990) for more information
about the corpus. In many cases one of the discourse participants is aware that the
conversation is being recorded but the others are not. Discourse participants who
are aware of the recording are given lower case letters as Speaker names, and
participants who are not aware have upper cases letters as Speaker names.
For the study here only a subset of 50 of the multi-speaker dialogues in the
LLC were examined. The excluded dialogues differed in that they were not
conversations, but instances of spoken monologue, prepared speeches, telephone
conversations or radio programs. The selected dialogues were spontaneous and
unrestricted, with 2-7 participants. Twelve of the dialogues were so-called
‘conversations between disparates’ while the remainder were ‘conversations
between equals.’ For each dialogue there is also information about the age, sex and
level of education of the speakers. In total they contained approximately 233,000
words. Tone units have often been considered a kind of sentence like unit for
spoken language and the selection contained 36,432 tone units.
1 The London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English can be obtained at
http://www.hit.uib.no/icame/icame.html
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