Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Data and Method
Additional excerptions where made from the corpus in order to make
comparisons with the behavior of some of the triggers. These are presented in the
sections where it is relevant to the argument. These included a double annotation
of the definite NPs, which was done with several additional categories than just
binding and accommodation. There was also a second annotator for the examples
in too. Also, an additional excerption was done for abstract anaphoric reference
from the complement of factive verbs and this is presented in chapter 4 and 5
where it is discussed.
The numbers of examples of each construction I found are probably not
exhaustive. Finding every example is always a problem with corpus work, in
particular when using an untagged, spoken language corpus. I am however
confident that I have found the majority of tokens of each type.
I have been conservative in my identification of examples of triggered
presuppositions. For factives, if there was no that signaling the sentential
complement, and if the factive verb was at the end of a tone unit, then the example
was not treated as a triggering expression. This is because it is not possible to
distinguish these examples from factives without complements followed by a new
sentence. Also, a large number of examples of you know without a that marking the
sentential complement. The number of these examples found are given in Table 2
but are not taken into account in the rest of the thesis. This is because it was not
possible to distinguish these structures from an emphasizing you know from the
surface form, and I also was not able to find reliable patterns in the prosodic
coding of the corpus to allow me to make a distinction.
In general, I will be illustrating interpretation in the theory by showing the
original transcript, with the original linguistic expressions but discussing its
resolution at the level of discourse representation. When necessary for clarification,
I’ll give the a simple DRT representation of the information relevant for the
example. But in general we will be looking at the original linguistic form, but the
process of resolving the presupposed material and the level of the discourse
representation, and discussing the interpretation it will get by discourse participants
based on this form.
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