Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
comparing the semantic contribution of one linguistic expression with another. In
many cases we are dealing with diffuse information contributed by several linguistic
expressions and by several speakers and we need to reify this information into a
single structured object when needed for anaphoric reference.
For many of the examples, because the linguistic form of the
presuppositional expression and the linguistic form of the potential antecedent are
often quite different, it is sometimes unclear if identifying a binding relationship is
justified. Therefore, each example was further examined to see if there were other
predicated or rhetorical relationships between the potential antecedent and the
presupposed information which could be considered to corroborate the
identification of the antecedent as such. Evidence from the response of the other
discourse participants, or the behavior of the speaker that supported the
recognition of a binding relationship was also considered.
Below I begin by presenting examples where the resolution was fairly simple
and is supported quite well on the basis of the semantic similarity alone. The later
sections of this chapter then go through different groups of examples where
identification of the antecedent was further confirmed by the recognition of the
other above mentioned factors.
For definite NPs, demonstrative NPs and possessives there were cases
where the linguistic form of the noun in the presupposition triggering expression
and the linguistic form of the noun in the potential antecedent were almost surfaceidentical
linguistic expressions, making the identification of the antecedent fairly
easy. This is illustrated in the following example.
(4) definite description, triggered p 7 : A-levels (3-1b 700)
Speaker A And . I . my A-levels are English French and *German*.
Speaker B *Yeah.*
Speaker A And I always enjoyed . {reading}, [@m] , I enjoyed very much reading
for the A- levels .
Speaker B Yeah.
For factives, aspectual verbs, it-clefts and too there were no examples found where
the presuppositional expression was a surface-identical match with an earlier given
linguistic expression. This means identifying antecedents was not simply matching
in these cases. There were, however, several examples where the presupposed
information and the potential antecedent were forms that were in a clearly
identifiable lexical relationship as in the two it-clefts given below. In the first
example, two speakers are discussing the attitudes of general medicine practitioners
and specialists.
(5) it-cleft, triggered p: "Someone/some are elitists" (2-9 625)
Speaker a: general science [@] general medicine now I thought was the . nonelitist
-~|
7 Here it would perhaps be more appropriate to label this the presupposed information induced
by the trigger, but to conserve space I am going to write the shorter “triggered p.”
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