Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

3.3 THE EXCERPTED EXAMPLES AND ANALYSIS
Data and Method
In doing the corpus study, I have tried to avoid trigger types where there is some
sort of dispute about their status as a presupposition trigger and about what they
presuppose. 2
In Table 1 the trigger types and the specific lexical items excerpted from the
corpus are presented. The basic method for analyzing the examples was to first do
a Key Word in Context (KWIC) excerption of each of the triggers using PCBETA,
a text processing program developed by Benny Brodda at Stockholm University.
The excerption of the abstract presupposition triggers 3 , e.g. aspectual verbs,
factives, it-clefts and too, was done on the entire 50 dialogues. For the definite NPs
the excerptions was only done on a subset of three interviews. Excerptions were
limited to declarative forms. Some of the trigger types did not appear once in the
corpus, for example there were no examples of factive verbs with subject sentential
complements. These triggers are therefore only discussed with made-up examples
in the remainder of the thesis. The actual number of each trigger type found, the
categories are given in Table 2. The method of identification follows the procedural
looping algorithm given in van der Sandt (1992) and described in chapter 2. Below
I give a simple step-by-step explanation of how this was done. More detail is given
in the later chapters where examples are discussed in more detail. But in general the
following procedure was use:
2 Except for, of course, too which I will argue presupposes something quite different from what it
generally believed, and possessive noun phrases where there are some differences in what people have
considered them to be presupposing, but where the differences aren’t that important.
3 Term from Asher & Lascarides (1998b) where they use it to refer to triggers that induce
presuppositions that are propositional or factive.
55