Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 4
Other corpus work has also mentioned additional features of abstract object
anaphors that are relevant here. Fraurud (1992) in her corpus study of abstract
object anaphors in written Swedish prose makes the following observation about
the inability of replacing some of the abstract object pronouns with definite NPs.
She writes (p. 36) “Some uses of pronouns are more or less obligatory
pronominals”… “ One (additional) reason for using such pronouns may be that it
is a convenient way of avoiding specifying the referent” and the reason for this is
because the abstract object, or complex situation to use Fraurud’s (1992) term
cannot be referred to with a clear nominal form. One of the major uses of abstract
object anaphors in Eckert & Strube’s (2000) study was a vague reference to what
they consider to be some kind of topic of the discourse at that point in time. Some
of these examples may also be cases where the pronominal anaphor refers to
abstract objects that are difficult to specify with a nominal phrase.
In summary, it seems that bound presuppositions and abstract object
anaphors can be seen as functionally complementary to each other: pronominal
anaphor can be used for given information that is currently salient or in focus if the
exact reference made is not important. In some cases, based on the observations by
Fraurud (1992), you may want to avoid actually identifying some explicit referent,
or identifying an explicit referent may not be very practical, and then the best
expression may be an abstract object pronoun.
In contrast, bound presuppositions can summarize or collect given
information in a unit or object that is more individuated and structured. Bound
presuppositions can be more precise in specifying what information is to be taken
as an antecedent because of their additional descriptive content compared with
anaphoric alternatives. In a situation where there is a chance for misunderstanding,
perhaps a common occurrence in multi-speaker discourse, we may prefer a
presuppositional expression for its precision. But when the abstract object to be
referred to is less important and we want to make less of a commitment to it, we
may use a pronominal anaphor.
In the following an additional features of bound presuppositions are
illustrated. Presuppositional expressions can add rhetorical effect to a message in
context where an abstract object anaphoric reference could not fulfill this function.
4.3.2 Binding relationship adds rhetorical effect to the message
In the following examples the presupposition and its potential antecedent are not
similar enough that an anaphoric relationship can be read off the linguistic
expressions. The exact semantic contribution of the antecedent and the
presupposition to the context is slightly different. But there are other clues in the
dialogue that seem to suggest that the presupposition contributes to the discourse
as part of a unit together with its antecedent, i.e. that it is in part dependent on
some of the descriptive content of the antecedent for its interpretation.
Additionally, perceiving the relationship adds rhetorical effect to the speaker’s
message in a way that an anaphoric alternative could not. By rhetorical effect I
mean that treating the presupposed material as bound strengthens a feeling of
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