Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
contrast, or alternatively strengthens a feeling of parallelism between the
presupposed information and its potential antecedent. I also believe that speakers
intend for this effect to be a part of their message. In many of these cases, if the
hearer did not perceive a relationship between the presupposed information and
the potential antecedent, then he has misunderstood the intended effect of the
speaker’s utterance. Consider the following example of an it-cleft presupposition.
(18) it-cleft, triggered p: "Someone said I wanted to sell out" (1-13 855)
Speaker A: James, it was no good. You didn‘t tell me to sell out antecedent, it was I who
said I wanted to sell out.
The presupposed material is reported information in the scope of the verb of
reported speech said, which creates an embedded context. This report is in turn
itself an expression of the propositional attitude want, with the proposition being
the speaker selling out. This creates another level of embedding. Intuitively, “You
didn’t tell me to sell out” is the antecedent, but the only information they share is
the proposition which is the complement of the parenthetical verb tell in the
potential antecedent, that is, that the speaker was to sell out. The speaker is
asserting that it was she and not James who instigated her ‘selling out’ event with a
contrast being made between the speaker being told and the speaker saying she wanted
to herself. Both these events will generally lead to the same result if all goes well,
that is selling out, so there is a semantic similarity in the information contributed.
Why should these two utterances be considered to be in an anaphoric
relationship? First notice how the second utterance functions as a correction to the
speakers first utterance, pointing out what she perceives James to have mistakenly
believed. There is also a clear parallelism between the two utterances in the choice
of expressions. Not seeing this relationship would miss the speaker’s intention in
saying the antecedent – if we don’t perceive the relationship here we have no clear
understanding of how the two utterances hang together, and we will have trouble
interpreting one as a correction for the other. Note that it is difficult to pinpoint
what truth-conditional difference would be the result of not recognizing this as an
anaphoric relationship, i.e. if the presupposed material was accommodated, how
would the truth-conditions differ from it being bound? But because of so many
other factors, I think the utterances are clearly perceived of as being in a type of
dependent relationship that could be considered anaphoric. Note also that in (18)
the presupposition could be simplified by replacing some of the information by an
ellipse so that it reads “It was I who said I wanted to ∅.” This would have the
effect of contributing the same semantic information, but the speaker’s message
would lose the contrasting effect if the expression ‘sell out’ is not repeated. So by
using a full presuppositional expression the speaker is able to emphasize the
contrastive relationship in a way that an anaphoric alternative could not.
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