Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
Speaker B [m]#|
Speaker a probably wouldn‘t get anything and B, it would be a long time before
you knew that you anything~|
The presupposed material and its potential antecedent are not surface-identical but
the information that you weren’t getting anything in the scope of the modal verb would
and probably will be able to easily serve as an antecedent to the induced
presupposition you weren’t getting anything which is also in the scope of the second
would. The induced presupposition in the second modal context needs to be bound
to material found in the first modal context, 11 i.e. this is an example of the
phenomena of modal subordination discussed in Roberts (1989). Modal
subordination is found with pronominal anaphor as well as with presuppositional
expressions, and it is in interesting to find a naturally occurring example with a
factive. Geurts (1999) gives a uniform analysis of examples of pronominal and
presuppositional modal subordination in an extension of the binding theory. His
analysis treats modals as presupposing their domains. This makes the second modal
can be bound to the domain of the first modal, in effect extending its domain.
Thus information in the first modal is accessible to the second and anaphoric
expressions can bind with antecedents in the first modal context. See Geurts
(1999) for further explanation.
What is central to notice here is that the speaker intends for us to perceive
the binding relationship with the presuppositional expression in order to strengthen
a feeling of parallelism, created by the speaker repeating different verbs,
“mightn’t/wouldn’t/weren’t” + “get/getting anything.” The presupposition could
be replaced with an abstract object pronoun, making it e.g. “B, it would be a long
time before you knew it,” but this would null the rhetorical effect of parallelism
created by using the presuppositional expression.
Consider now the following example with an aspectual verb.
(21) aspectual verb, triggered p: speaker’s sister was telling her off before
(1-12 1108)
Speaker B And, uh, so I rang up and my sister answered the phone and she -
really gave *me a* terrible harangue.
Speaker D ** Yeah.
Speaker B Over the phone - going on, and on, and on, about - how could I say
such things {and so on}….
Speaker c Trivial.
11 This is actually a simplification of the analysis of the example. Compatible antecedent
information is already introduced in Speaker a’s first statement of “you mightn’t get anything,” so
it would be within the modal context created by might that the antecedent information would be
found.
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