Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 4
perceiving the coherence of the discourse. These additional functions make
presuppositions much more than long-distance anaphors. This is seen in a closer
examination of cases where an anaphoric expression would be able to pick up the
same antecedent in the same context, but where a presuppositional expression was
used instead. These examples show that the use of a presuppositional expression
contributes additional meaning. This point will be illustrated by contrasting bound
factive presuppositions with several examples from the corpus of abstract object
anaphors in the object complement of factives, an anaphoric alternative to factive
presuppositions. This comparison illustrates that, while the abstract object
anaphors and the bound factive presuppositions function similarly, the bound
presuppositions add additional meaning in part because they have descriptive
content that can in a more refined way pick up a specific part of earlier given
information. One example also suggests that hearers seem to perceive even longdistance
relationships between presupposed information and potential antecedents,
accessing the earlier context where the antecedent was introduced in a way similar
to the interpretation of long-distance anaphoric relationships.
Some observations are also made about hierarchical discourse structure and
its relationships to anaphoric and presuppositional information. The corpus data
does not support the proposal that a hierarchical discourse structure limits
availability of antecedents for bound presuppositions.
Finally, I will discuss how the results relate to the view of presupposition as
anaphora, other characterizations of presuppositions and the functions of the
presuppositions induced by different triggers in discourse.
4.1 ANAPHORS AND ANAPHORIC BINDING
One of the claims of the binding theory is that presuppositions behave like
anaphors. Later, in a stronger claim, Geurts (1999) argued that pronominal
anaphora are actually a form of presupposition. In section 2.3.2 we saw that locally,
they seem to function the same as anaphoric expressions. But are induced
presuppositions used and perceived by speakers and hearers in a way similar to
pronominal anaphora in extended discourse? To examine this question in relation
to the corpus data, we need to first identify what characteristics have been
associated with discourse anaphors in extended discourse.
The discussion will focus on pronominal anaphors that can be used to refer
to the same types of things that the triggered presuppositions studied in the corpus
can be used to refer to. The class of anaphoric expressions that has all these
characteristics is pronominal anaphors. For the most part, we will also compare
abstract object pronominal anaphors with triggers that induce presuppositions of
abstract objects. However, we will also compare pronominal singular anaphors with
definite NPs, 1 which are treated here as presupposition triggering expressions.
1 Here definite NPs refers to definite descriptions which are singular and plural NPs introduced
by the or other conversational variants of the (here dhi), demonstrative NPs modified by that, this,
these, those, as well as all NPs modified by possessive pronouns and noun phrases in genitive case
(e.g. with genitive ‘s).
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