Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
4.3.4 The binding relationship needs to be perceived to make the discourse
coherent
In the following example the information content of the presupposed material and
the potential antecedent are different. The presupposed material cannot be replaced
with an abstract object anaphor, and there is no evidence from the speaker or from
the reaction of the other participants that some kind of binding relationship is
perceived. Still, in order to understand the coherence of the discourse it is
necessary to perceive the relationship. In the following example, Speaker A is
telling a story about her experience barrier nursing for a very ill child. The child has
some type of streptococcus bacteria that is highly contagious. The disease is the
reference of the first it in the first utterance given below.
(24) factive verb, triggered p: You are going to knock out an expectant mother. (1-8
993)
Speaker A It was lethal to expectant mothers antecedent with small children.
(38 more lines about barrier nursing and caring for very ill child)
Speaker A After all, I mean you can‘t go down and shop if you know that you‘re
going to knock out an expectant mother-it was some
streptococcus {that he‘d got}
Finding the propositional antecedent in this example involves identifying the
relationship between the group of expectant mothers and a single instance of an
expectant mother, and recognizing that “x is lethal to y” refers to the same state of
affairs as “x will knock out y.” The function of the presupposition seems to be to
emphasize the great degree to which the speaker was affected by the exposure to
the illness. Here it would not be possible to replace the presupposition with an
abstract object pronoun, in particular because of the distance. But on the other
hand, given the topic, the only information that could appear after the if-clause has
to be some sort of explanation about why shopping would not be possible, e.g.
because the speaker could infect someone for whom catching the disease could be
deadly, i.e. pregnant women. But using an abstract pronoun alone would not
achieve this meaning, perhaps because of the distance and perhaps also because
there are several other related ideas that could appear here as well. Using the
presupposition is necessary to make clear exactly what is meant and if the generic
expression wasn’t meant as a generalization of the speakers own health status
because of the nursing, then the discourse is not coherent.
4.4 PRESUPPOSITIONS AND GLOBAL DISCOURSE STRUCTURE
Several researchers have suggested that global discourse structure will affect the
availability of antecedents for anaphoric expressions, and in turn that anaphoric
expression usage will give us evidence of a hierarchical discourse structure. Is a
hierarchical discourse structure relevant to the availability of antecedents for bound
presuppositions as well?
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