Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 4
Consider the following example where using a presuppositional expression
triggered by a factive verb strengthens the perception of parallelism between the
utterance with the triggering expression and the utterance with the antecedent
information.
(19) it-cleft, triggered p: She is unusual (1-3 1190)
Speaker c: - [m] - - but the same time she seems unusual, doesn‘t she.
Speaker A: Yes. Yes. And everybody NOTICES that she‘s unusual 10
Here, Speaker c (male) suggests ‘she is unusual’ and Speaker A (female) replies with
a very similar proposition, that the person referred to as ‘she’ is unusual. The
triggering expression is the factive verb notices and the presupposed information is
that the person referred to this way is unusual.
Clearly these two propositions, “she seems unusual” and “she is unusual.”
are related, even if they are not identical in the semantic contribution that they
make. Perceiving this relationship is key to understanding the function of Speaker
A’s utterance. From the definition of discourse segment given above, Speaker c and
Speaker A’s utterances can be considered to form on discourse segment. Speaker c
expresses an assessment and Speaker A expresses her agreement by first grounding
with “Yes. Yes” and then making an even more specific acknowledgment by
presenting via presupposition a similar proposition. Speaker c’s original, and
somewhat weaker assertion, that ‘she’ only seems unusual, can be interpreted as a
kind of hedging, i.e. explainable as an unwillingness to express a negative opinion.
So Speaker A’s presupposition serves the discourse function of letting Speaker c
know that she agrees with his assessment. Replacing the factive complement with
an abstract anaphoric expression, e.g. if the utterance had read “And everyone
notices it” then we would still interpret Speaker A’s contribution as expression
agreement with Speaker c. But the perception of parallelism decreases, and as a
consequence of this Speaker A’s statement loses some of its strength. The need for
a stronger sense of parallelism is perhaps especially appropriated just because
Speaker c’s utterance is hedged because it is an assessment of another person’s
character. Let’s look at another example of a factive presuppositional expression
that strengthens a perception of parallelism.
(20) factive, triggered p: you weren’t getting anything (2-1@ 645)
Speaker a I can only say that [@m - - - @] you must take you must take Joe
Power‘s advice on this [@m] - for the little that I know about the Ford
Foundation and it is very little - [@m] would have been that A, you
mightn‘t get anything~|
10 Note that the triggered presupposition, if bound with an antecedent derived from Speaker c’s
expressions ‘she seems unusual’, will have to retrieve that antecedent information from an
inaccessible context according to the rules of semantic accessibility in DRT. That’s because the
seems will create a modal context. For further discussion of accessibility and presuppositional
binding see Zeevat (to appear).
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