Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 4
Speaker C: *Presumably* (f)
Speaker B: *Yes -*, it would be +non-surreptitious +(g)
Speaker A: Yes, (h)
but THAT wouldn‘t matter. (i)
In the above example, four different speakers take part, and identifying discourse
segments was not totally straightforward. Here, different speakers ground the same
utterance, e.g. it seems that (f), (g), and (h) all are grounding (e), making it one
discourse segment. Utterance (b) is not grounded. Note that it overlaps with part of
(c) and is not completed, being almost devoid of content, which is probably also
why it is not recognized by the others. Here I have split Speaker A‘s utterance into
two utterances, (h) and (i), because (h) seems to solely have a grounding function
and belongs to the previous discourse segment, whereas (i) seems to be
informative, though it is not clear if this is the correct segmentation. Speaker A‘s
abstract anaphoric reference in (i) seems to refer to the immediately preceding
grounded utterances (e) through (h), or could perhaps be considered to referring to
only the grounded portion, (f) through (h), but clearly it refers to the fact that the
recording from the University of the air will be non-surreptitious. This again shows
the problem of granularity. It is not clear what analysis is correct, though in both
cases the abstract object anaphor derives its antecedent from an immediately
preceding utterance within the proceeding discourse segment. It is very unlikely
that the anaphor could be referring to the discourse segment that makes up (a)
through (d), because it would then be referring to the fact that they are disparates
as well. Note that it THAT in (i) refers to the semantic contribution of (e) or (g),
which is arguably the same situation. Therefore we can’t really say that it refers to
(e) or (g), it takes as its antecedent the semantic information contributed by these
utterances in the discourse representation.
The general pattern seems to be that the discourse segment immediately
preceding the utterance with the abstract object anaphoric reference provides an
antecedent for the abstract object anaphor, which in some cases can be interpreted
as referring to a semantic object derived from a larger segment than just the
previous utterance. In most cases there is a core element that quite clearly forms
the basis of the antecedent, but how much additional information is also included is
not definitively determinable.
Let’s now look at a presupposition triggered by an aspectual verb that can be
bound to information derived from the previous linguistic context. The following
example, the presupposition induced has the synthesis of several utterances, made
by several different speakers, plus world knowledge as its potential antecedent.
Note that Speaker A and B (=Debbie) are married and Speaker d (female) is going
to get married.
(15) aspectual verb, triggered p: “people give you things before (Marriage)”
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