I know that women don’t like me!’ Presuppositions in therapeutic discourse Marta Andersson pot

This article contributes to a very scarce body of empirical work on presuppositions, as it scrutinizes examples of presuppositions that act like discourse anaphors in the context of thre

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‘I know that women don’t like me!’ Presuppositions in

therapeutic discourse

Marta Andersson

English Language Department, Stockholm University, Universtietsva¨gen 10E, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden

Received 23 March 2006; received in revised form 11 March 2008; accepted 25 September 2008

Abstract

One of the biggest problems concerning presuppositions has been correctly dealing with their sensitivity to the context, i.e why inferences triggered by certain expressions do not project out in all linguistic environments, even though the triggering words preserve their semantic content in different settings The answer which is of particular interest here goes along with the principles of the binding theory of presuppositions developed by van der Sandt (1992) According to this theory, presuppositions behave as anaphors and can be resolved in the same way at the level of discourse representation This article contributes to a very scarce body

of empirical work on presuppositions, as it scrutinizes examples of presuppositions that act like discourse anaphors in the context of three psychotherapeutic sessions Such sessions can be analyzed in the same way as ordinary spoken discourse; however, the initial premise that the usage of presuppositions differs in this genre in comparison to daily interaction is confirmed The results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis indicate that presuppositions are used for different strategic reasons in the two genres compared, which influences the way they should be interpreted and also their frequency

Keywords: Anaphors; Accommodation; Binding; Presupposition; Representation

1 Introduction

The crux ofvan der Sandt’s (1992)binding theory, proposed as a solution to the projection problem of presuppositions (discussed further), is the idea that they can be handled using the same mechanism that is used to resolve anaphoric pronouns in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT,Kamp, 1981; Kamp and Reyle, 1993) Van der Sandt’s claim is that presupposed information can be bound to an already existing antecedent in the discourse, exactly like pronouns Therefore it can serve as one of the ways of referring to such an antecedent, along with pronouns and demonstratives However, as van der Sandt argues, even if no suitable antecedent is given in the discourse, the rich semantic content of presuppositions enables them to accommodate, i.e create their own antecedent, which is impossible for anaphors or pronouns

The biggest dissimilarity between these two strategies for presupposition resolution is that bound presuppositions (and anaphors) refer to hearer-known information already present in the discourse, while accommodation is regarded as a way

to introduce discourse-new information, in which case the hearer needs to adjust cognitive structures and create a part of the speaker’s meaning by using inferences This is feasible on the basis of presumed common knowledge (Stalnaker,

1974:450) that enables the speaker to surmise what the hearer possibly knows and introduce such information felicitously

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Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 721–737

E-mail address: marta.andersson@english.su.se.

doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2008.09.033

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Most of the work on presuppositions written beforevan der Sandt’s (1992)binding theory was coined had examined them merely in meticulously contrived examples eagerly quoted and dissected from paper to paper (seeKarttunen, 1973; Gazdar, 1979; Levinson, 1983) The only empirical studies on presuppositions known to me are those byPrince (1978)on it-clefts,Fraurud (1990)on definite descriptions,Sbisa` (1999) on the persuasive and informative use of presuppositions in the Italian press andSpenader (2002)on presuppositions in casual and casual-like conversation Apart from that the approach to presuppositions has been mainly philosophical rather than discourse-analytic, although, asSpenader (2002:49)argues, looking at naturally produced examples can yield new results in research into the communicative effects of using these inferences As features related to the context, presuppositions disclose the speaker’s state of knowledge and his/her assumptions on the hearer’s knowledge Thus they cause various reactions in the hearer, which is particularly discernible when analyzing longer stretches of spoken dialogues Hence, from the vantage point of the speaker’s intentions, therapeutic discourse seems to be a particularly interesting subject for analysis, as the exchange of information in this genre has a clear pragmatic goal, unlike in casual conversation (often just ‘talking for the sake of talking’,Eggins and Slade, 1997:6) investigated by Spenader Moreover, the information communicated via presuppositions and the way in which they contribute to the hearer’s understanding of the message are particularly salient in therapeutic discourse, as they can influence and eventually even change people’s (patients’) behaviour, which is not always the case in casual talk We can, therefore, presume that the strategies for presupposition resolution may be different in these two genres

In this article I will investigate 1) whether binding as a strategy for presupposition resolution is more frequent in therapeutic discourse than in casual conversation Such an assumption seems rather apt, as it relates to constant referring to the same limited and repeatedly examined issues (ubiquitous in therapeutic sessions), and therefore suggests that one of the features distinguishing therapeutic discourse from ordinary conversation might be the frequency of bound presuppositions Moreover, asLabov and Fanshel (1977:62)write, the aforementioned acts of reference play a salient role in making the flow of a conversation smooth, which seems particularly desirable in therapeutic discourse and will also be illustrated in the further discussion

Van der Sandt’s binding theory also brings in part into question what the utility of using a bound presupposition would be, if an anaphor would suffice In section2.2I will indicate 2) that in many cases the rich semantic context of presuppositions validates the aptness of their use as more efficient counterparts of anaphors and also 3) that the use of presuppositions instead of anaphors creates certain rhetorical effects particularly useful in therapeutic discourse The following paper will 4) also attempt to investigate instances when there are no accessible reference markers in the preceding discourse In such cases presuppositions are usually accommodated, but the kind of information they introduce may create certain obstructions in communication, particularly when the information is hearer-new Hence

my hypothesis is that introducing new information via presuppositions may be avoided in the genres that have a clearly specified pragmatic goal, which will be discussed in section2.3

1.1 Presuppositions in the binding theory

From the vantage point of their logical properties presuppositions are inferences induced by certain linguistic expressions (presuppositional triggers) They can be distinguished from the context they occur in by means of established linguistic tests (Levinson, 1983:168) Consider the following examples:

(1) Eve has stopped smoking

(2) Eve hasn’t stopped smoking

We can infer both from (1) and (2) that Eve has smoked before, as the underlined expressions implicate this fact The negation test illustrated in (2) is a common way in which inferences can be regarded as presuppositional This is converse

to asserted information and entailment, for the example in (1) entails the fact that Eve does not smoke and asserts that she quit, all of which disappear under the negation However, certain contexts make presuppositions vanish:

(3) If Eve has smoked, she has stopped smoking

The presupposition that was triggered in (1) and (2) obviously does not project out of this environment, as the fact of Eve’s smoking is questioned by the antecedent of the conditional This illustrates the most perplexing aspect of the

M Andersson / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 721–737 722

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nature of presuppositions, which, in the literature, is called the projection problem (seeKarttunen, 1974; Levinson,

1983) This problem concerns presuppositions triggered in compound sentences in which the implications of separate clauses do not always emerge (as in (3), which indicates their sensitivity to the context of an utterance (Geurts, 1999a:46)

The projection problem had for decades been treated very differently by linguists who adhered to semantic approaches to presuppositions and those who subscribed to a pragmatic view (seeKarttunen, 1973, 1974; Stalnaker, 1974; Gazdar, 1979; Levinson, 1983) A new light on this issue was shed byStalnaker (1974), who claimed that presuppositions treated from the pragmatic view of the speaker can differ from those treated semantically According

to his intuitions pragmatic presuppositions do not hold in compound sentences, as the speaker builds on what s/he has already said Hence, what is asserted cannot be later presupposed, as in the case of conditional sentences where presuppositions do not project out if information is asserted in the antecedent Stalnaker was, therefore, one of the first who treated presuppositions from the vantage point of context

It is now generally acknowledged that the interpretation of presupposed information should not be tackled on the level of the sentence, but we should instead account for the whole array of cognitive activities that accompany the process of comprehension and interpretation, within which meaning and its representations are constructed by the entire discourse This goes along with the assumptions of DRT, which is a cognitivist theory according to which mental processes involved in language comprehension play a prominent role The theory is related to the representations of the entire discourse (Discourse Representation Structures—DRS), not just individual sentences, and considers the construction of meaning as a process that proceeds sentence by sentence Each next sentence S contributes new information that updates the already existing representation (DRS) and changes it into a new one that includes

S (Kamp and Reyle, 1993:11)

As a solution to the projection problem of presuppositionsvan der Sandt (1992)extended DRT and proposed the binding theory, according to which presuppositions can be treated like pronouns or other anaphoric expressions at the level of representation in DRT Presuppositions can be resolved against the content of an evolving discourse by establishing a link between them and their antecedents, and this one of the two possible mechanisms for presupposition resolution is called binding The other mechanism is based on the rich semantic content of presuppositions thanks to which they can accommodate an antecedent even if it is not given in the discourse This constitutes, according to van der Sandt, the only essential difference between presuppositions and anaphors Consider first an example of binding:

(4) If Eve is seeing a guy, then he is divorced

(5) If Eve is seeing a guy, then the guy is divorced

As we can observe here, whether we use an anaphoric expression (the pronoun in (4)) or a presuppositional one (i.e the noun1in (15)), there will be no differences in interpretation of these sentences, and this, asvan der Sandt (1992:344) writes, suggests that there is a similar force that underlies both pronoun resolution and presupposition projection Hence we should not treat the presupposition that does not project in (5) as cancelled, but bound to an antecedent in the preceding discourse, exactly like the pronoun in (4) In such a case the presuppositional construction will be absorbed in its antecedent and lose its presuppositional status.2

The anaphor in (4) is the most basic and the most uncontroversial example of incremental interpretation and it is, at the same time, closely related to familiar patterns of cohesion (Halliday and Hasan, 1976:276) As we can observe in (5), the presuppositional expression acts exactly in the same way, which makes the anaphoric character of definite NPs and the presuppositions they mark uncontroversial

It is not only definite NPs, however, that can be resolved by the same mechanism that DRT uses with anaphors.Van der Sandt’s (1992:342)claim also covers aspectual and factive verbs, cleft sentences, temporal clauses and adverbs like too or even, all of which can also be bound to an antecedent Presuppositional information, according tovan der Sandt (1992), should be bound to an antecedent in discourse in order to get an interpretation, exactly like anaphors However, there is a difference between the two that emerges when a compatible antecedent cannot be identified in the

1 Definite NPs trigger a presupposition that there is such a referent given in the discourse.

2

This is why bound presuppositions should rather be called: presuppositional inferences, as van der Sandt argues However, these two terms are used interchangeably in the literature on presuppositions, which I will follow in the present study.

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preceding discourse In such a case a sentence with a pronoun will be impossible to interpret,3while a presuppositional expression, as it has a richer descriptive content, will provide its own antecedent, add itself to the main context and bind with that antecedent This process is called accommodation A good example of a presupposition that has to be accommodated is given in Lambrecht (1994:14) in his discussion on markedness in information structure The example depicts a woman who causes a delay of a bus and apologises the other passengers saying4:

The definite possessive NP (my car) presupposes that the speaker has a car Invan der Sandt’s (1992)view this expression has sufficient semantic content to establish its own antecedent and bind with it As he also argues, binding just updates the information already present in the discourse, while accommodation revises the context of an utterance and then enables an interpretation of presupposed information AsSpenader (2002:29)writes, the hearer has to infer the context that the speaker is tacitly asking him/her to treat as already discourse-given, create part of the speaker’s meaning and modify his/her own discourse representation by adding the presupposed information to the DRS This process is regarded as the speaker’s ‘mistake’ that the hearer needs to repair Therefore accommodation is considered

to be a repair strategy and should be used only after all potential possibilities for binding fail (van der Sandt, 1992; Geurts, 1999a)

1.2 Therapeutic discourse

A therapeutic interview can be described as a type of conversation (Labov and Fanshel, 1977:30) However,

a therapeutic session, unlike a casual conversation, is constrained by the agenda and the limitations of possible topics

to discuss Therapeutic talk is a complex interactive situation between the patient whose task is to give the therapist an account of his/her problem and the therapist whose job is to collect a valid database, develop an evolving understanding of the patient and influence his/her way of thinking (seeBlanchet et al., 2005:125ff) The process of influencing derives from concrete verbal and non-verbal actions and interactional approach which should lead the patient to reshaping his/her representation in a more efficient and logical manner This means that the therapeutic interventions should help the patient develop a new conception of his/her problem, i.e insight (Blanchet et al.,

2005:126) The expected new representation may come only through further talk and gradual modifications to the patient’s discourse and, eventually, his/her self-concepts

The most problematic feature of therapy emerges at this point, as in the course of an ordinary talk we can expect to be experts at least in one area: our inner world (Labov and Fanshel, 1977:34) In a therapeutic session the patient’s biography often renders a substance that is moulded in a way that is divergent from what his/her own model of this world represents In order to influence this process the patient formulates his/her thoughts so that they fulfil a certain emotive function: affect the listener, make him/her respond, move him/her, etc These verbal strategies pertain to pragmatic intricacies of language use that concern the speaker’s intended meaning in a certain context In the context of a therapeutic talk this meaning is a means to represent the patient’s model of experiences

In this model the patient makes certain assumptions (Bandler and Grinder, 1975:52) One of the ways in which they protrude linguistically is presuppositions These are a prominent characteristic of human discourse in general, but the strategies for their resolution may be different in different genres In therapeutic discourse presuppositions may serve (from both the patient and the therapist’s perspective) as technical tools whose objective is to maintain the overall continuity of the topic and enhance the discourse flow, but also as rhetorical devices used in order to influence the interlocutor, provide him/her with additional clues, enhance the claim, or, possibly, serve as avoidance or defence strategy As the above reasoning indicates, therapeutic discourse is a clearly goal-oriented genre and therefore it is interesting to investigate whether its presuppositions have different pragmatic functions from those generated in the course of casual conversation

3 This is, certainly, an oversimplified approach, since pronouns provide some descriptive content and in certain environments it is possible to interpret a pronoun without any clear antecedent in the preceding context Yet this discussion is beyond the scope of the present paper.

4

Neither the question of markedness of information, nor any other communicative and pragmatic functions of this example are the subject of the discussion in this study.

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1.3 Corpus and method

The corpus of this study consisted of transcripts of three authentic therapeutic sessions Sessions 1 and 2 were borrowed from therapeutic books (Session 1 from:Sluzki, 1990; and Session 2 from:Bandler and Grinder, 1975) Both

of them are initial meetings between the therapists and the patients, in Session 1 the patients are a couple (Jennifer and Larry), while Session 2 has a single patient (Ralph) Session 3 was a subsequent meeting which I was lucky enough to obtain a recording of thanks to the courtesy of an English-native-tongue therapist and her patient from The Institute of Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy in Stockholm.5

The transcriptions were stored electronically, and all triggers were identified and analyzed in the context from the vantage point of presupposition resolution, i.e either a suitable antecedent was found in the possibly closest context or presupposition was treated as accommodated The triggers considered here were borrowed fromGeurts (1999a:2)and

Spenader (2002:58)and comprise:

definite NPs (the N; demonstrative NPs, possessives)

it clefts (it is/was Ci that/whom/which S-Ci)

aspectual verbs (begin, finish, start, stop, cease, continue, carry on, avoid, force, hesitate, prevent)

factive verbs (know, realize, resent, find out, discover, notice, see)

Both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the presuppositions triggered by specified expressions in the context of this particular genre were, subsequently, compared with a corpus study of presuppositions in English conversation bySpenader (2002)

Features excluded from the analysis comprise certain instances of definite NPs such as fixed expressions (e.g in my eyes), idioms (e.g the nuts and bolts etc.), calculable forms (i.e using information about a reference time and a reference place, such as: in that moment), known information (entity that is new in the text, but belongs to general knowledge, e.g the world) and also cases of bridging.6Examples of factive verbs devoid of that sentential complement

or at the end of a tone unit were also discarded (e.g ‘‘She knew ’’ where it was hard to determine what ‘knew’ actually presupposes) All this follows the procedure ofSpenader’s (2002)study However, abstract triggers in sentences of all types were considered here, while Spenader’s survey was limited to those occurring in declarative sentences only The reason for that is that certain interrogative forms may make it rather difficult to get clear intuitions about what the presuppositions in a sentence are; for instance: ‘Did you discover that John was the murderer?’ might presuppose that John was the murderer, but could be a question about the presupposition itself Such ambiguous examples were also discarded in the present paper, but more straightforward interrogative forms were included, as they are crucial in therapeutic discourse (see examples from Session 2 in 2.2 and 2.3) Presuppositions triggered in such non-declarative sentences considered here constitute 3% of the whole corpus

2 Analysis

2.1 Cases of binding and accommodation in numbers

Table 1shows the strategies for resolution of definite NPs

Table 1

Resolution of definite NPs in therapeutic discourse and casual conversation.

Trigger type Therapeutic discourse (7 900 words) Casual conversation (8 972 words)

5 Stockholms Institut fo¨r Psykodrama, Sociometri och Gruppsykoterapi.

6 Cases like: ‘‘Sarah is married The guy is divorced’’ (Session 3, line 18) where the definiteness of the nominal in the second sentence implicates that it is a part of given information, even though physically absent in the preceding utterance According to the binding theory it can be treated as a stage between binding and accommodation (see also Clark, 1975 ).

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The figures for definite NPs in casual conversation are based on a subcorpus of three dialogues, which had a combined length of 8972 words These figures are the average of the results of the two annotators annotating Spenader’s corpus of definite NPs7for binding and accommodation (for practical reasons I did my own annotation) Therefore the corpora sizes are very comparable

There is a statistically significant difference at p < 005 between the number of bound and accommodated NP presuppositions in therapeutic talk This observation is revealing, as it indicates that therapeutic discourse is, indeed, different from casual conversation Particularly the balance between the bound and accommodated possessive NPs in therapy talks in comparison to daily discourse is significant, as they refer to constantly repeated personal information (e.g ‘my husband’) ubiquitous in this genre Perhaps the most surprising result is the higher frequencies of both bound and accommodated ‘the NPs’ in casual conversation (the difference is significant at p < 001) Yet therapeutic discourse is fixed on the same, recurrent topics (it may, therefore, have more pronouns), while in ordinary interaction shifts in topic are quite frequent (Spenader, 2002:51-ff) Thus the variety of both referring and new expressions can be higher in the latter genre.Table 2shows the results for abstract triggers

Identifying a suitable resolution strategy was probably less complex for the analyst in the present study than in the case

of casual conversation, where the information is more messy and diffused among several speakers (Spenader, 2002:68) However, it was not always easy to decide if information should be regarded as hearer-new or maybe discourse-new and,

in the case of binding, if certain information was semantically similar enough to be an antecedent of another expression Yet considering the sizes of both corpora we can conclude that abstract presuppositional triggers are substantially more frequent in therapeutic discourse than in casual conversation (the difference is significant at p < 001) The reason might

be that they can be used to refer precisely to abstract objects (facts, opinions, situations), which is crucial in this genre

Table 3shows the number and distribution of all the chosen presuppositional triggers in the material analyzed

The figures inTable 3 indicate that binding predominates in Session 1 ( p < 001) and 2 ( p < 005), while in Session 3 both strategies for presupposition resolution are used quite freely (with a non-significant predominance of accommodation) Since Session 3 is the only analyzed transcript of a subsequent therapeutic talk, while the other two are first interviews, it can be suggested that there might be certain differences in the use of presuppositions between initial and subsequent therapeutic sessions A comparison between these two types of therapeutic talk, however,

Table 2

Resolution of abstract triggers in therapeutic discourse and casual conversation.

Trigger type Therapeutic discourse (7900 words) Casual conversation (233 000 words)

Table 3

Resolution of each trigger type in each session.

Binding Accommodation Binding Accommodation Binding Accommodation

7

For more details see Spenader (2002:162-ff)

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deserves a separate study based on more empirical material Yet the frequencies presented here will be interpreted in more detail in section3

As the above results show, binding is overall the predominant strategy for presupposition resolution in the analyzed corpus Yet more material is needed in order to provide even stronger empirical evidence for this initial observation for the whole genre This concerns particularly the strategies of resolution of abstract triggers in whose case a bigger corpus is needed in order to obtain significant results

2.2 Bound presuppositions in the context

This section will show that presuppositions act like their anaphoric counterparts and are interchangeable with anaphors but also often show much greater adaptability in the context, i.e they are able to pick up an antecedent even if

it would not be possible for a pronominal expression (e.g due to remoteness) They also contribute to the overall continuity of a topic, which is the reason why they are often used instead of anaphors The continuity of the topic is a feature of particular importance in therapeutic discourse, but the examples below will also illustrate rhetorical effects and other possible reasons for using full-fledged presuppositions instead of anaphors in this type of conversation Moreover, in more complex cases the mechanism of binding will also be described in closer detail Triggered information will be underlined and its antecedents italicised in the whole paper

There is only one example in my corpus that illustrates a presupposition that, in terms of traditional presupposition theory, does not project out the embedded context:

(7) definite (possessive) NP; induced information: specified feelings (S3:135–139)8

P: ( .) He deprived us of all this .and he still says that he had feelings for me, you know, loved me; cared

I don’t believe him In my eyes even if he had feelings for me (a), those feelings (b) didn’t have anything in common with love (A)

The sentence (A) could serve as a paradigm example in the literature on presuppositions written a few decades ago

As we can see, the presupposition: those feelings is not inherited by the whole compound sentence, since the demonstrative points at feelings whose existence is questioned in (a) According to the previous theoretical approach the presupposition is cancelled here, whilevan der Sandt (1992)claims that it acts exactly like an anaphoric expression (‘they’) would – it is bound in the first conjunct

The whole utterance, rather perplexing for linguists and language philosophers, in this context simply shows that the patient does not commit herself to the assumption that her husband loved her at the moment she refers to and the full-fledged presupposition (instead of anaphor also in this context felicitous) supports her belief state Consider an example of presupposition that can be replaced with an anaphoric expression:

(8) factive; TP:9it is safe to have these feelings (S1:37–39)

J: Well, when I say ‘‘communication’’, I mean exchange of feelings and ideas and thoughts, you know, a sharing of these things I mean exposing one’s vulnerabilities and feeling that it’s safe to do so (a) And my feeling is that if you can do that with somebody, you establish a closer relationship with that person

T: That makes sense

J: And, uh, that’s what I mean by communication And, also, not being afraid to show these feelings is important

I think that’s the first step in realizing that it’s OK or it’s safe to have these feelings and to show them to the other person (b)

T: Are you talking about yourself, or are you (Sluzki indicates ‘‘gotcha’’ by making a stabbing gesture toward Larry and simultaneously emitting a short, humorous noise.)

J: Oh, I’m talking more about Larry.(c)

The triggering expression in (b) (realize) and its complement are a reformulation of an earlier utterance The patient decided on using a presupposition, although the entire sequence in (b) could have been replaced with an anaphor

8

S3:135–139—Session 3, lines: 135–139.

9

Abbreviation for: triggered presupposition.

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(‘this’) Yet this simple expression might have not been specific enough to clearly delimit what part of her concept is referred to Another reason for using a full-fledged presupposition might be the emphasis she wanted to put on her views, which would not have the same rhetorical effect in the case of an anaphor The presupposition makes her claim

in (a) clearer and stronger, which is particularly interesting when juxtaposed with the fact that the proposition is in the scope of the propositional attitude verb: ‘think’ (Biber and Finnegan, 1989:119) This verb shows epistemic hesitation

by the speaker on the one hand, which, on the other hand, is immediately suppressed by the presence of the factive verb According to the mainstream conviction, when using a factive verb, the speaker presupposes that the complement

of the sentence expresses a true proposition (Kiparsky and Kiparsky, 1971:345;Levinson, 1983), i.e commits him/ herself to the truth of this proposition, unlike in the case of epistemic stance features marking hesitation.10 Since Jennifer almost immediately admits that her utterance concerned her ideas about how her partner should act in their relationship (c), we can conclude that the stance marker was used probably in order to hedge the force of presupposition triggered by the factive Consider another example:

(9) it-cleft; TP: there is a wall built (S3:50–54)

P: No, maybe it just sounds like that .I love Jonas, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t even try .It’s just that after so many years of quarrels, I feel that there’s a wall (a) between us But I didn’t want to build it (b), I don’t feel guilty, it’s him who built up this wall (c)

T: Do you ever try to do something about it? About the wall?

AsSpenader (2002:81)argues, it-clefts are particularly well suited for corrections, as they focus on one element (the one that must be corrected) and background the rest In therapeutic discourse corrections seem to serve the obvious purpose of assigning the responsibility to the other partner and defending oneself (Labov and Fanshel,

1977:229) Here the patient introduces a new referent in (a), develops the representation in (b)11and binds (c) to the information provided both in (a) and (b) The anaphoric relationship between (a) (b) and (c) is discernible on the basis

of the correction that the latter utterance makes to the first two The presupposition triggered by the it-cleft in (c) points

to something that might have been mistakenly inferred from both (a) and (b) and corrects it The full presuppositional expression, again, could have been replaced with a simple ‘did it’ In such a case, however, the whole utterance would have lost its emphasis and rhetorical effect Furthermore, the obvious and manipulative focus on the other person’s guilt would not be so conspicuous and, at the same time, the patterns of problematic behaviours not so easy to perceive

In this case the therapist immediately identifies the patient’s assumptions of being a victim of her partner and challenges them by shifting the focus to what she does in the relationship Thus the patient’s strategy actually facilitates what the therapist wants to achieve (i.e changes in the patient’s self-concepts) Consider another example: (10) factive; TP: Janet was not interested in Ralph (S2:34–41)

R: She just didn’t like me.(A)

T: How, specifically, do you know that Janet didn’t like you?

R: She wasn’t interested in me.(a)

T: Interested in what way?

R: She didn’t pay attention to me.(B)

T: How didn’t she pay attention to you?

R: She didn’t look at me

T: Let me see if I understand this You know that Janet wasn’t interested in you (b) because she didn’t

look at you?

R: That’s right! (c)

T: Is there any way you could imagine Janet not looking at you and still be interested in you?

R: Well .I don’t know

T: Do you always look at everyone you’re interested in?

R: I guess .not always (d)

10

‘Think’ is a doubt verb (see Biber and Finnegan, 1989; Ajimer, 1996 ).

11

Note that anaphoric ‘it’ is used here only in the relation to (a).

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The presupposition in this passage could easily have been replaced by ‘this’ (like in (8)), but this simple anaphoric expression might have not been specific enough to clearly demarcate what part of the patient’s concept is referred to: (A), (a) or (B) Even though all these utterances convey similar information, relevant reference seems to be particularly important in therapeutic discourse, as the therapist shows

The therapist’s intervention in the quoted passage consists in repeating verbatim the patient’s generalized and scanty information and bolstering it by means of presupposition (know that Janet wasn’t interested in you) This eventually leads to the patient corroborating his views in (c) and to the reconstruction of the situation that is obscurely introduced in the preceding discourse The most important factor here, however, is the fact that the presupposition is triggered by a factive verb (‘know’), which, as mentioned before (see (8)), presupposes that the uttered proposition is true Hence the patient’s loose ideas implying that he knows what other people think and feel about him, summarized and bolstered by means of exactly this presupposition, provide a basis for the therapist’s attempt to make him see his erroneous way of perceiving his personal problems (d) AsBlanchet et al (2005:124) write, the paradigm for all psychotherapy is to encourage the patient to change his/her viewpoint and discourse about a subject of direct concern

to him/her The above example illustrates how a deconstruction of the patient’s initial point of view may be initiated by the therapist, in this specific case by means of a presupposition Consider one more example:

(11) aspectual verb; TP: there is something to tell (S2:97–102)

T: Did you ever let her know for sure that you loved her [Ralph’s mother]? (a)

R: She knew (b)

R: I I I guess I don’t

T: What prevents you from telling her? (c)

R: Ummm umm, maybe nothing

R: Well, I guess I could

The aspectual verb prevent triggers a presupposition that Ralph has something to tell to his mother Ralph’s utterance in (b): ‘she knew’ implies quite clearly that he did not tell his mother about his feelings and even though he chooses not to spell it out, the therapist apparently obtains a clue that is strong enough to generate such a hypothesis The latter is expressed via an aspectual verb that presupposes that something stops Ralph from making the confession

in question By saying it the therapist in a clear and concrete manner encourages the patient to modify his approach to this sensitive issue, which he eventually does The presupposition also suggests that the therapist is qualitatively listening and actively exploring the patient’s conceptions of his problems

Moreover, the presupposition is more felicitous in this context than anaphora would be (i.e ‘what prevents you from doing this?’), since it is the former expressions that make the utterance clearer, concrete and more informative, all

of which are crucial for establishing connections and understanding between therapists and their clients (see also

Hilsenroth and Cromer, 2007:210ff)

The above examples indicate that bound presuppositions are interchangeable with anaphors; however, using the former can change the rhetorical effect and efficacy of utterances, while the latter lack the same force Presuppositions also exhibit greater adaptability in the context than anaphors do, as the next example will show:

(12) definite description; TP: shame (S3:21–155)

P: Shame, (a) shame is the punishment for that .I’m ashamed because I tolerate what he did ( .)

(58 turns later)

P: Yeah And when he almost managed to convince me that he was honest about his feelings, this huge punch

came Have you ever reflected on this word ‘‘dumped’’, how nasty it really is? You really start to feel like trash when it concerns you!

T: Then you feel the shame .(b)

The most significant feature of the above passage is that the presupposition picks an antecedent at a considerable distance and after the topic of the discussion has drifted away from what the patient initially said This would not be

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possible for an anaphoric expression, as its semantic content is not rich enough to bind over such a long distance, which illustrates how presuppositions contribute to the discourse flow In this example the presupposition in (b) gives the therapist a chance to be perceived as a good and active listener interested and involved in the patient’s experiences Particularly Sessions 1 and 3 are pervaded with this type of long-distance bound presuppositions made by the therapists, by which they can prove that they analyze and obtain clues when listening to the patients’ discourse Section2.2discussed the problems thatvan der Sandt’s (1992)binding theory has not yet satisfactorily addressed, i.e what the distinctive features are of cases where a full-fledged presupposition is used even though an anaphoric expression would have functioned As the above examples indicate, these uses are often occasions when an abstract concept is being referred to, as in (8), (10), (11) or when a simple anaphoric expression is not specific enough, e.g (8), (10) Presuppositions can also be used instead of anaphors for rhetorical purposes, as in (8), (9), (10), (11), and, in some settings, as more efficient counterparts of anaphoric expressions e.g (12)

Section2.3will consider examples of presuppositions that do not have any antecedent to bind to

2.3 Accommodation

Accommodation is considered to be a repair strategy, a ‘mistake’ that the speaker made when planning and making his/her utterance It is believed to be usable for signalling hearer-old and discourse new information, since this type of information is also part of the common ground between interlocutors and simply makes the hearer recognize and retrieve what is important in the current discourse (Spenader, 2002:111) Hearer-new information, on the other hand, does not have this status and therefore is a potential source of communicational obstruction

However, according toSpenader’s (2002:102-ff)findings about casual conversation, in surprisingly many cases when the speaker believed that the information was hearer-new, s/he intentionally used presupposition, in order to highlight the newly introduced entity This observation is revealing, since the mainstream assumption concerning presuppositions is that they are rhetorically related to discourse and serve a background function to other non-presupposed information (see Asher and Lascarides, 1998; Delin, 1995) However, as Lambrecht’s (1994:61ff)

discussion on presuppositions triggered by factive verbs illustrates, in some cases the proposition expressed in the complement clause does not have to be part of shared knowledge, for instance: I didn’t realize that you LIED to me! This sentence presupposes that the speaker was lied to and asserts that s/he was not aware of this fact at some earlier point in time, thus it could not have been part of common knowledge Yet in this case such an interpretation is strongly related to the accent placement, while Spenander’s study did not include any analysis of the influence of prosody on presupposed material This fact suggests that presuppositions may be in general (i.e independently of prosodic marking) quite commonly used to signal hearer-new information

Since obstructions in communications are particularly infelicitous in goal-oriented genres, it is therefore assumed that introducing new information by means of presuppositions may be avoided in therapeutic discourse, or that it may have a clear pragmatic goal.Spenader (2002:116f)does not offer a clear answer to the question why the speakers in her corpus use this strategy so frequently, but the heterogeneity of spoken discourse makes this problem hard to unravel The following section will investigate whether the reasons for intentional introduction of new information in therapeutic discourse are easier to interpret and how often this strategy is used A full-fledged comparison between the strategies used individually by the therapist and the patient is beyond the scope of the present study, yet certain differences will be illustrated

Three factors will be considered in the analysis of the examples: (a) length and informativeness of the sequence usually signalling that the information evoked is new (Prince, 1978), (b) the role of the message in the current discourse (i.e hearer-new information should be the speaker’s main point) (c) the hearer’s reaction (seeSpenader,

2002:111) In more complex cases also the mechanism of accommodation will be described in closer detail Consider the first example:

(13) definite description, TP: there are other men (in Jennifer’s life) (S1: 190-195)

L: Well, in the first number of years we were in a stage that I think was fairly different

We were younger and I think she was a different person, and I was a different person in the sense that our values were different and our internal whatever drives us, I think, was slightly different Things have to happen to us since

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