Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
Speaker d Doesn't seem much different *except for* trying to answer these awful
conundrums about what shall we give you - and trying to fit it **in ( -
laughs)** (a)
Speaker B **that's . {that's} . nice** (b)
Speaker d Yes but…
Speaker A +{That's the bit} Debbie enjoyed enormously+ (c)
Speaker B Oh that's much the that won't [haep] that won't -+ yes. that won't
happen again. so I should enjoy it very much. (d)
Speaker d *yes that's true* (e)
Speaker B *Cos that stops* {very rapidly} after you get married actually#|
ALL ( - - - laugh)
Speaker B People stop giving you things (g)
Here the presupposition triggered, that people will have been giving you things
before marriage, is clear from the earlier context and seems to be the intended
reference of that in the utterance in line (f). However, this proposition is presented
in bits and pieces, in several statements with three speakers participating: In (a)
Speaker A mentions the difficulties she has had in telling people what she would
like as wedding gifts. This is the introduction of the topic, and Speaker B’s
statement in (b) begins with an abstract anaphoric reference that which seems to
refer to either the entire statement made by Speaker A or to the situation of being
able to say what you would like as a gift. Speaker C’s statement in (c) also seems to
refer to gift receiving with the reference to ‘That’s the bit.’ Speaker B then also uses
‘that’ in (f) to refer to the same idea referred to by ‘That’s’ in (c), gift receiving, but
it may not be quite clear at that point what the reference exactly is. The following
explicit reference to the idea using a presuppositional expression corresponds to
what seems to be the idea that was referred to with all the previous instances of
abstract reference, though this is the only point in the discourse where it is made
explicit. Note however that the reference of the that seems to be the idea of giftgiving,
whereas the presupposition induced is that people generally have been
giving engaged couples gifts, the state of being the object of receiving gifts, in other
words. The fact that Debbie in (c) enjoyed this enormously, and that other people
were having problems trying to decide what to give in order to participate in this
gift giving is clear from (a).
Thus, at the level of discourse representation, the information contributed
by each of the different utterances will have to be combined into something that
can function as an antecedent. The use of the triggering expression has a
summarizing function that is well known in anaphors, and is particularly common
with anaphoric references to abstract objects, as seen by many of the other
expressions. But an anaphoric expression here in the same position would not have
the same effect as the presupposition because the presupposition has descriptive
content which helps specify in more detail the information that is meant to be
considered as one idea. This allows the speaker to explicitly express as a whole an
idea that was present only in bits and pieces in the earlier discourse, perhaps even
contributed by one or more speakers. It may be that in a multi-speaker discourse
setting, because information is being contributed from so many different
79