Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
Thus for many examples it is difficult to see what the truth-conditional difference
will be to the interpretation of the discourse representation if we bind or if we
accommodated because we don’t have clear intuitions.
This is prevalent with abstract objects is because they are not individuated in
the same way that concrete semantic individuals are but are “a matter of
convention within our conceptual scheme” (Asher 1993, p. 258) and are therefore
more dependent on the manner in which they are introduced and described in the
discourse. This perhaps explains in part why they may be more dependent on
discourse structure when serving as antecedents to anaphoric reference (e.g.
Webber 1991, Asher 1993).
Please note that there certainly are cases of triggered abstract
presuppositions where identifying the antecedent is essential for understanding the
discourse. This is most clearly seen when the antecedent information is found in an
embedded context. For example:
(12) If John is the murderer then the inspector hasn’t realized that John is the killer.
If the speaker fails to bind the presupposed information “John is the killer” to the
antecedent of the conditional, then it will be accommodated in the main context
which will lead to the whole discourse breaking the informativity constraint
because the antecedent of the conditional will already be entailed in the context of
interpretation. The resulting discourse would read “John is the killer. If John is the
murder then the inspector hasn’t realized that he is.” This is then equivalent to
“John is the killer and the inspector hasn’t realized this,” but a very unwieldy way
to express this. Therefore the discourse is not well formed with this resolution.
For examples like these it is clear that resolving the presupposed material as
bound and resolving the presupposed material as accommodated lead to different
interpretations. These are also exactly the kind of examples we find in theoretical
work on presupposition. But the reason why we can so clearly distinguish between
the two interpretations is because of the nearly identical linguistic expressions and
because the presupposition triggered would be bound in an embedded context, so
we can clearly understand what the different resolutions would mean. The cases
where we can distinguish clearly between an interpretation with accommodation
and an interpretation as binding are cases where the information will end up in
different levels of embedding if it is accommodated or presupposed as in (12)
above.
However, these types of examples were not found in the corpus. Many of the
cases in the corpus were triggered presuppositions that would either be
accommodated in the main DRS or bound in the main DRS, where the linguistic
expression that induce the presuppositions and the linguistic expression from
which the potential antecedent is derived are sometimes very different. The
combination of these two characteristics means the semantic difference between
binding and accommodation is not clearly distinguishable. Additionally, the
presupposed material’s relationship with the rest of the discourse information
would in most cases differ minimally regardless of the resolution strategy chosen.
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