Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
invited him. Note that we cannot replace the relative clause with an anaphoric
expression, e.g. “It was he who did it.” The following example illustrates a
presupposition induced by a factive.
(7) factive verb, triggered p: Poppy took her engine to pieces (1-12 341)
Speaker B Well, once when Poppy had stripped down her engine in her car - and
was standing there and . you were . helping her and when Miss Black
went past she said -sort of I did notice Poppy - sort of taking her
engine to pieces * and your husband saying . all right.
Speaker c *[m]*
Speaker B Now put it together again, and she said, could she really, put it together
and I said well I don‘t know whether she could but she had to *because
she was . left to do it .
Just as anaphoric expressions can refer to a different semantic type than its
antecedent so can a presupposition bound to an abstract object. In this example
Speaker B first describes an event or possibly a situation; the event of Poppy stripping
down her motor. She then reports on what Miss Black said, taking Miss Black’s
perspective in her reporting, putting the description of the earlier event in the
complement of the factive verb notice. So the presupposition has the semantic status
of a reported fact, but it will need to take an event as an antecedent. This means that
presuppositions seem to be able to take antecedents of different semantic types in
the same way as abstract object anaphors, i.e. the type-coercion discussed earlier.
The next example shows an aspectual verb whose induced presupposition
can be bound. Aspectual verbs presuppose states. The point of the utterances they
appear in is to make clear that there was a change or a non-change in the state, e.g.
either that a state continued, began, or ended. In this particular example, the
discussion is about the constancy of the personality of an acquaintance. Speaker A’s
presupposition, that the acquaintance was made at a time earlier to the reference
time of the utterance with the aspectual verb, is already given in Speaker b’s
comment.
(8) aspectual verb, triggered p:“she was mad before” (2-14 977)
Speaker b Yes, but she was always rather mad.
Speaker A Oh she was, yes - -
Speaker C #
Speaker A And she continues to be mad I mean she‘s one of these rather nice
people who obviously go on being mad, till their dying day.
The following example of an induced presupposition also has an aspectual verb as a
trigger. The information exchange here is particularly interesting because it is a
combination of the questions and answers of the participants that together
contribute to the antecedent information.
(9) aspectual verb, triggered p: “(you) haven’t prepared earlier to now”
(2-11b 346)
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