Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 4
This makes determining resolution difficult. For the abstract objects there
were no examples where the abstract antecedent was surface-identical with the
presupposition-triggering expression, though examples where they were quite
similar were given in the last section. But for many examples it is difficult to have a
clear intuition about how an interpretation as binding and an interpretation as
accommodation will affect the truth-conditional meaning of the utterance. Because
of this we have to look for other collaborating evidence that the induced
presupposition needs to be, or is perceived as, bound. These clues can be found in
the reaction of the discourse participants, or in the rhetorical or discourse effect
that seems to be intended.
For some of the cases we also have to explain in part why a speaker would
choose to use a bound presupposition. Given that we generally expect speakers to
use shorter anaphoric expressions if the meaning will be the same, it follows from
the Gricean maxim of quantity that speakers don’t need to say more than is
necessary. We need an explanation, therefore, for why speakers would choose to
use presuppositional expression if an anaphoric expression was possible.
In the following sections I will first present evidence where presuppositions
have functional traits similar to anaphoric counterparts, and then show additional
examples which illustrate that bound presuppositions are functionally more
versatile in their different roles, being more precise and clearer than their anaphoric
counterparts. This also gives us an explanation of why speakers would choose to
use bound presuppositions even if they could have used an anaphoric expression.
This should be evidence that bound presuppositions and anaphor are of the same
kind, but they are also different in that presuppositions have more utility, an ability
that stems from their additional descriptive content.
4.3.1 Bound presuppositions make more precise references to abstract
objects
Do induced presuppositions of abstract objects behave or function in a similar way
to anaphoric expressions that refer to abstract objects? If the answer to this
question is yes then we can say that we have found additional evidence to consider
presuppositions and anaphors to be of the same kind. But in order to fully
understand if this analogy is an accurate one, we need to look at some examples of
abstract object anaphors in the corpus to see how they behave. I’ll first present two
examples from an additional excerption done on the LLC corpus of abstract object
anaphors that appeared as the complement of factive verbs. Abstract anaphors also
appear in other segments in different environments and I’ll discuss these as well.
After this data is presented, I’ll give several examples of induced presuppositions
that have similar, but additional functions. 9
In the following example the abstract object anaphor refers to a portion of
the information contributed by the previous utterances.
9 Some of this work was first presented in Spenader (2001c).
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