Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 3
information. There do not seem to be any specific proposals for DRT either. This
is an area that needs further study to at least give guidelines on how the
contribution of this information could be partially represented.
The second kind of information that is difficult to handle is temporal and
spatial references whose exact values can only be calculated with access to the
location and time of the dialogues. The information provided with the corpus
contains only the year of the recording, and no information about season, time of
day or location. This means that these types of references, which can however
often be understood by reading the entire transcript, cannot be properly modeled
or taken into account in an explicit way in the analysis. For the most part they do
not affect the analysis. Generally, what is important are the times and locations of
described events in relation to each other and not the actual time of the
conversation. There is some work on integrating this type of information into DRT
because it affects many different types of linguistic phenomena. For example,
Krause et al. (1999) in their work on the representation of localization dialogues
attempt to integrate spatio-temporal knowledge into the DRSs. Again, when it
seems to affect of the analysis of the presupposition, I will point this out.
The third type of information is the common ground shared by the
participants. There are frequent references to individuals, events, places, and even
procedures that are completely foreign to a transcript reader. This has a large effect
on the analysis of the presupposed information, especially for those examples that
are considered to be accommodated. I have tried to point out where there are
problems in completely interpreting the work as often as it arises. Exactly how
common ground or shared information contributes to dialogue is something for
which there are many proposals, and much theoretical discussion. The interested
reader can look at Zeevat (1997, ms; 1998). I will point out in the analysis of the
examples cases where the shared information between the participants has made
full understanding of the presupposition difficult.
Finally, general world knowledge is continually being used by speakers to
support their communication, and while a great deal of this world knowledge is
fortunately something I share with the discourse participants, there is much that is
unclear and sometimes difficult to interpret without carefully reading the entire
transcript several times. Some of these difficulties have to do with the fact that
most of the recordings were made in the late 60s and early 70’s in England. They
therefore contain references to things that are not part of my world knowledge, as
an American of a younger generation. But for the most part I don’t believe this has
affected the analysis of the presuppositions more than making studying the
transcripts more of a challenge than they would perhaps be for a British researcher
from the same generation as the recordings. I have tried to obtain help from
someone more familiar with this dialect and the references made by the speakers
for problem examples. If I was unsure about an analysis, I will point this out.
54