QUESTIONING IN ADVERSARIAL CONTEXTS: ISSUES OF CONTROL AND PRESUPPOSITION

As stated above, much work on courtroom discourse has focused on the means by which cross-examining lawyers use questions to impose a particular version of events on evidence. Indeed, Woodbury's (1984) category of “controlling” questions is defined in precisely this way: in terms of the extent to which a question's form imposes a questioner's interpretation or words on the evidence. Thus, within Woodbury's continuum of control, a broad wh-question such as “And then what happened?” displays little control because it does not impose the questioner's interpretation on the testimony: there is no proposition contained within the wh-question other than the notion that “something happened.” By contrast, a yes/no question with a tag, such as “You were attracted to him, weren't you?”, is more controlling than a broad wh-question within Woodbury's continuum of control because it contains a pseudo-proposition – “the witness was attracted to him” – that is made available to the third-party recipients, irrespective of the addressee's (i.e., witness's) answer.

Even more controlling than yes/no questions and their pseudo-propositions are questions with presuppositions (Ehrlich 2001). On one analysis, a question always contains a variable or unknown quantity, which the addressee of a question is being asked to supply (Lyons 1977). For example, the addressee of the yes/no question with a tag exemplified earlier, “You were attracted to him, weren't you?”, has the ability to disconfirm the proposition contained therein even though the question's particular form expresses “the speaker's expectation that his belief, whatever it is, will be confirmed” (Woodbury 1984:203). By contrast, presuppositions cannot be denied with the same effectiveness or success. Indeed, it is precisely the capacity to survive in the context of negation that has been taken to distinguish presuppositions from semantic entailments. The following examples are taken from Levinson (1983:192):

(3) is a semantic entailment of (1) in the sense that if the chief constable arrested three men he must also have arrested two men. (2), on the other hand, is a presupposition of (1). If sentence (1) is negated as in

the semantic entailment in (3) dissolves, whereas the presupposition in (2) survives. In this sense, presuppositions seem particularly resilient to negation (and denial).

In sentences (1) and (4) the presupposition “There is a chief constable” is tied to a particular linguistic expression – here the definite description, “the chief constable.” The fact that presuppositions are closely tied to the linguistic structure of sentences has led some linguists to propose a class of “presupposition triggers.” These are linguistic expressions or constructions that seem to carry with them presuppositions about either the existence or the truth of something. Karttunen (cited in Levinson 1983:181) has collected 31 such triggers. This list includes definite descriptions, implicative verbs (e.g., managed implies tried), change of state verbs (stop, start, continue imply that whatever action they modify has happened), cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences (e.g., It wasn't John that hit Rosie implies “someone hit Rosie”; What John didn't miss was the noise implies “John missed something”), and a number of other constructions. In the following, we examine one particular trigger: verbs identified by Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1971 as “factive.” These are verbs such as be aware, realize, know, and regret that presuppose the truth of their complement. For example, the sentence John realizes that Mary is seriously ill presupposes the truth of the proposition “Mary is seriously ill.” That is, in uttering such a sentence the speaker takes for granted that this proposition is assumed knowledge between speaker and addressee, forming the background for the assertion “John realizes X.” By contrast, the sentence John thinks that Mary is seriously ill does not presuppose the truth of the proposition “Mary is seriously ill.” In fact, this second sentence could be appropriately produced by a speaker who knows the embedded proposition to be false.

A number of scholars have pointed to the important role that presuppositions may play in institutional discourse. For instance, in his investigation of racist discursive strategies in the press, van Dijk 1991 argues that presuppositions are a powerful instrument in the implicit assertion of debatable propositions. Likewise, Chilton (2004:64), in his discussion of political discourse, suggests that presuppositions contribute “to the building of a consensual reality.” Within the context of courtroom discourse, cross-examining lawyers can implicitly assert damaging evidence through the use of questions with presuppositions; and given that presupposed propositions are not the primary ones under question, witnesses may be legally prohibited from challenging or denying them. Indeed, Gibbons (2003:98), in his summary of work on coercive questioning in police interrogations and courtroom discourse, states that addressees have difficulty disagreeing with or challenging the presuppositions of questions.

Clearly, a central concern within the study of presuppositions has been their resilience to negation, denial, and disagreement. And, while this “constancy under negation” (Levinson 1983:168) is generally cited as a defining property of presuppositions, much has also been written about the scope ambiguity of negation in relation to presupposition. Consider (4) above: On one interpretation (the presupposition-preserving one), the existence of the chief constable is presupposed, and it is asserted that he did not arrest three men. On another interpretation (the presupposition-denying one), it is denied both that there is a chief constable and that he arrested three men. This second interpretation of (4) is equivalent to (5) below.

One way of accounting for the difference between the presupposition-preserving interpretation of (4) and the presupposition-denying interpretation of (4) (where it is semantically equivalent to (5)) is to posit a scope ambiguity: Negation occurs either with wide scope as in the presupposition-denying interpretation of (4), or with narrow scope as in the presupposition-preserving interpretation of (4) (Levinson 1983:171). According to Levinson, the former – that is, the presupposition-denying interpretation – is the less usual interpretation. Indeed, Grice (1981:89) also comments on the preference for the presupposition-preserving interpretation of negative sentences containing definite descriptions: “Without waiting for disambiguation, people understand an utterance of the ‘The king of France is not bald’ as implying (in some fashion) the unique existence of a king of France.” Given these claims about preferred and less usual interpretations and given the importance of these issues to the investigation of presupposition more generally, it is perhaps surprising how little effort has been devoted to examining how participants in fact understand such sentences. In this article, by moving the analysis away from invented examples and reliance on intuitions and toward a focus on what people actually do in talk-in-interaction, we hope to shed some light on the question of how presuppositions are in fact understood by participants. In this we draw upon the method of conversation analysis, which focuses on the sequential organization of talk, precisely because in responding to previous turns, including those that contain presupposition-triggers, speakers reveal their own understanding, interpretation, or hearing of them. Thus, we can potentially examine such pragmatic phenomena as presuppositions within the unfolding course of talk to find out how they are actually taken up and dealt with by participants.

Of course, it is in the nature of presuppositions to be essentially passed over. That is, in much of everyday talk participants simply do not display any explicit orientation to presuppositional material. Consider the following example, which contains the factive predicate “know” at line 16.

Here Hyla has just admitted to her friend Nancy that she called an ex-boyfriend the night before but hung up as soon as she heard his voice. Hyla then goes on to regret the call on account of the 75 cents it is likely to cost her. At this point Nancy seems to be ready to offer a solution (line 5) but is preempted by Hyla in line 6. In attempting to find some good in otherwise bad news, Nancy suggests that Eh least you know 'e was ho:me,= =on a Thursday ni(h)ght. Hyla's subsequent rejection of this effort, She coulda been l(h)ying ri'next to u(hh)m hh=, is registered by Nancy in line 23. Nancy's Eh least you know 'e was ho:me… contains the factive predicate know, which, on the standard analysis, presupposes the truth of its complement, here “he was home on a Thursday night.” Clearly, that presupposition is not taken up in the subsequent talk – it is not challenged; indeed, it is not made explicit in any way whatsoever. Moreover, the presupposed material is something that has been established in the prior talk. That is, that “he was home” is a straightforward inference from the fact that he answered the phone.

In conversation, then, we find that presuppositions (here complements of factive predicates) are usually not taken up and made explicit in subsequent talk, and further that they are, quite typically, matters that have been established in the just preceding talk. The presuppositions we examine from inquiry testimony differ in both respects. In the data we examine below, lawyers' questions often contain presupposed material that has not been established in prior talk. Moreover, in this situation, we find that participants frequently orient in various ways to presuppositions. In our data, rather than being passed over, presuppositions are regularly dug out, made explicit, and challenged by the witness. Thus, in this essay not only do we examine the way that a witness resists damaging evidence that takes the form of presupposed material; we also argue that such a context – that is, one where contested evidence is presupposed – provides a kind of natural laboratory for the investigation of the ways in which presuppositions are understood and resisted in interaction (or at least, in one context of talk-in-interaction).

TYPE-CONFORMING VS. NON-TYPE-CONFORMING RESPONSES

In attempting to characterize responses in our data that challenge or problematize presuppositions, we have drawn upon Raymond's (2003) distinction between type-conforming and non-type-conforming responses to questions, a distinction based on the extent to which responses conform to the constraints embodied in the grammatical form of a question. So, for example, “yes” and “no” (or an equivalent token) are type-conforming responses to yes/no questions (in the terms above, such a response will address the primary proposition under question), while responses that depart from the constraints embodied in a yes/no question are non-type-conforming. Type-conforming responses, whether affirmative or negative, accept the terms and presuppositions of a yes/no question, whereas non-type-conforming responses treat them as problematic in some way (Raymond 2003:949). More specifically, Raymond argues that in ordinary conversation speakers are accountable for designing their utterances, including their yes/no questions, in such a way as to reflect what common knowledge exists among interlocutors, what has or hasn't been established in prior talk, what is an appropriate action for an interlocutor, and so on – in other words, so that their yes/no questions permit type-conforming responses. By contrast, according to Raymond (2003:957), in courtroom discourse, cross-examining lawyers often design yes/no questions containing presuppositions that support their client's version of events and that will not necessarily reflect what is common knowledge among interlocutors, what has been established in prior talk, and so on. And, as has been well documented by a number of researchers (e.g., Atkinson & Drew 1979, Danet et al. 1980, Walker 1987, Cotterill 2003), in courtroom talk witnesses can be, and often are, legally compelled to produce answers that take particular forms (for example, “yes” or “no” forms as responses to yes/no questions).

As an example of the institutionally sanctioned character of type-conforming responses in courtroom discourse, consider excerpt (7) below, taken from Janet Cotterill's work on the O. J. Simpson trial. This example comes from direct examination of a witness for the defense.

The witness's response to Cochran's yes/no question did you ever have occasion to either touch or bump into Mr. Simpson at all is non-type-conforming and proposes to tell of a particular situation. Darden, the prosecuting attorney, interrupts the witness's answer with an appeal to the judge, claiming that the witness is being non-responsive. The judge compels the witness to produce a type-conforming response, remarking The witness may answer yes or no. We see from this example, then, that witnesses in courtrooms can be compelled to produce type-conforming responses.

Although cross-examination in inquiries is organized in essentially the same way as in trials, there are nevertheless some important differences. In the first place, unlike a trial, an inquiry is not adversarial, with two sides offering competing versions of what happened. In fact, according to the official mandate, an inquiry is strictly a “fact-finding” exercise and not an attempt to attribute responsibility and assign blame. As such, although witnesses typically have their own counsels present under cross-examination, it is relatively unusual for those lawyers to raise objections to the questions of the cross-examining lawyer. Furthermore, and important for our purposes, cross-examining lawyers rarely attempt to exert control over the form of witnesses' answers in an inquiry; in fact, they have no legal recourse to do so. Indeed, procedural rules specify only what form the question, rather than the answer, should take. Thus, a document issued at the start of the inquiry (“The Walkerton inquiry: Rules of procedure and practice”) includes the following specification of procedure:

FACTIVE PREDICATES AND PRESUPPOSITIONS IN THE LAWYERS' QUESTIONS

In inquiry testimony, as stated above, witnesses are not compelled by lawyers or judges to answer questions directly or, put another way, to produce type-conforming responses to questions. In fact, in many of Harris's responses he usurped the topical agenda set by the questions, often at the same time challenging the damaging presuppositions they contained. The examples discussed below all involve yes/no questions containing what Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1971 call “factive predicates.” As noted above, according to Kiparsky & Kiparsky, such factive predicates presuppose the truth of their complements. Thus, when lawyers questioning Harris employed a factive predicate in their questions, they were presupposing the truth of the complement of that predicate, and, if Harris produced either a “yes” or a “no” response to such a question, he would be confirming the truth of the presupposition. As can be seen from examples (8a)–(8c), lawyers incorporated factive predicates into their questions (e.g., be aware, regret), thereby presupposing certain (damaging) evidence, and Harris endeavored to resist the force of these damaging presuppositions (i.e., the complements of the factive predicates) by withholding type-conforming responses to the questions.

In (8a) and (8b), Harris does not respond with “yes” or “no” answers to questions of the form “Are you aware of that?” or “Are/Were you aware that X?”; similarly in (8c), he does not respond with “yes” or “no” answers to questions of the form “Do you regret not X?” or “Do you have any regret in not X?” While these examples show generally that Harris withheld type-conforming responses to questions with damaging and incriminating presuppositions, the particular ways that he resisted the presuppositions are described below.

Addressing presuppositions directly and not producing recognizable answers

One of the ways Harris resisted the presuppositions of lawyers' questions was to address directly, and to problematize in some way, the damaging presupposition. Given the taken-for-granted quality of presuppositions, however, addressing the presupposition directly required that Harris withhold an answer to the main proposition of the question (see also Clayman & Heritage 2002). Not surprisingly, such departures from answering the question were treated as “non-answers” by the questioning lawyer. Consider excerpt (9) below, where the lawyer, Muldoon, questions Harris about his failure to intervene in government policy that eventually led to the Walkerton disaster (part of this excerpt appears in 8c):

In lines 24–26, Muldoon produces his first of several questions that employ the factive, regret, and a complement clause characterizing Harris's non-intervention. Such questions presuppose that Harris has not intervened in government policy, even though, according to some of Muldoon's previous questions, Harris was aware of the negative impacts of such policy. Lines 49–50 show Muldoon repeating a version of the same question, thereby reinvoking its relevance and treating Harris's talk in lines 27–46 as not answering the question. In lines 53–56, Harris explicitly challenges the presupposition contained in Muldoon's question – that Harris did not intervene – characterizing it as an assumption that Muldoon ought not to be making. By addressing the presupposition directly – and problematizing its status as a presupposition – Harris is not addressing the main thrust of the question. In line 68, Muldoon once again asks do you regret not intervening. Harris's response in line 69–71 to this version of the question is similar: He problematizes the status of his non-intervention as something that should be taken for granted, saying well: I didn't say I didn't intervene. Notice the well preface, indicating that his response is contrary to expectation.

Lines 73–75 show Muldoon once again producing a version of the same question: Do you regret not taking further actions in exploring what the nature of the impacts were which were on that document. This time Harris's strategy is slightly different. While he again directly addresses the damaging presupposition, and thus does not answer the question as put, he does so by denying the presupposition, not (as in the previous two examples) by problematizing its status as a presupposition. That is, the no in line 76 is not a denial of his regret, but rather a negative response to the presupposition of the question – that he did not take further actions. Indeed, in answering Muldoon's question, we see Harris asserting in lines 77–78 that he took every action a premier would be expected to take: no=I took every action that you would expect a-in my view a premier to take. Here Harris orients to the scope ambiguity of negation noted earlier: He does not simply respond with “no” but rather spells out explicitly what he is denying. In the examples discussed up to now, then, Harris withholds type-conforming responses that would confirm the damaging presuppositions of Muldoon's questions; in resisting the presuppositions of the questions, he addresses the presuppositions directly either by problematizing their status as presuppositional material or by explicitly denying the presupposition itself. By continuing to repeat similar versions of the same question, Muldoon displays his orientation to Harris's responses as non-answers to the questions as put.

Transforming presuppositions while producing recognizable answers

While the examples discussed up to now show Harris addressing the damaging presuppositions of questions directly (and thus not answering the question as put), the next set of examples show Harris producing responses that are recognizable as answers by virtue of repeating the factive predicate embodied in the question. Typically, the “answers” in which Harris repeats the factive predicates also rework the presuppositions of the questions. And, not surprisingly, the reworked presuppositions reduce and diminish Harris's and his government's responsibility for the Walkerton tragedy. In example (10a), the lawyer employs the factive predicate be aware in his question, thereby presupposing the clearly evaluative formulation that the Ministry of the Environment had als-already suffered serious cuts. By either confirming or disconfirming the lawyer's question, Harris would be vulnerable to being heard as accepting the presupposition.

In response to the question, Harris repeats the factive predicate but replaces the presupposed complement. In Harris's version, suffered serious cuts is replaced by put under restraint. That is, Harris transforms the original presupposition of the lawyer's question – that the Ministry of Environment had … suffered serious cuts – into a less damaging one, that the Ministry of Environment's budget was put under restraint.

In example (10b), the question begins with the factive predicate understand. After the content of the question is produced – containing the presupposed material – the lawyer reinvokes the question using another factive predicate, be aware.

Harris responds, as in (10a), by repeating the factive predicate in his answer. While the lawyer's questions in lines 1–5 presuppose that a 48% cut to the Ministry of Environment included privatization of labs and reduced inspections and enforcement, the presupposition of Harris's answer is a diminished one: Harris is/was only aware that private labs would be used. In the follow-up question posed at lines 15–18, the lawyer again uses the format of a factive predicate + complement. In responding, Harris once again repeats the predicate while substituting his own complement for the one contained in the question. The lawyer's question in lines 15–18 presupposes that evidence in the Inquiry establishes that there is some connection between cuts to the Ministry of Environment under Harris's tenure as premier and the Walkerton tragedy. Harris's substituted complement, by contrast, presupposes a weaker claim: that evidence has been produced that had talked about that.

In example (10c), the lawyer is questioning Harris about the perception that the jobs of Ministry of Environment workers might be jeopardized if they were to raise concerns about the operation of public works. The lawyer characterizes this as troubling, in this way embedding the proposition under a factive predicate.

Harris responds by once again repeating the factive predicate. Here, however, rather than substituting a different presupposed complement for the one that was included in the question, Harris merely adds to it in such a way as to challenge the relevance of the lawyer's implication that the perception persists.

As Clayman & Heritage (2002:247) have noted, one of the ways that a stretch of talk becomes recognizable as an “answer” is by preserving some of the exact wording of the question in the response to that question (see also Button 1992). When Harris repeats in his responses the factive predicate of the preceding question (as we have seen in examples 10a–10c), however, he is not just creating a recognizable “answer”; he is also reworking the question, transforming the presuppositional material that the question embodies. As a final example of this strategy, consider lines 82–85 of example (9), discussed earlier, where Muldoon once again repeats some version of his regret questions: There's no further regret at this point … thachyou did not take any other steps. In lines 86–87, Harris repeats the factive predicate, regret, in his response, but transforms its complement; that is, Harris does not regret that he did not take any other steps, but rather regrets what happened in Walkerton. Instead of challenging the damaging and incriminating presupposition of the question (as we saw in previous answers to the regret questions), here Harris appears to answer the question as put, but transforms the damaging presupposition of the question into a benign one. And, by confirming this transformed – and benign – presupposition, Harris obscures any role that he might have played in the contamination of water at Walkerton.⁵

The reader will notice that in some cases regret is used as a verb, while in others it is a noun. Although we focus here on factive predicates, noun forms in the constructions here appear to carry the same presuppositions. It should also be noted that although, in line 86, Harris is responding to the noun form in lines 82–85, in his answer he uses regret as a verb.

When examining the force of presuppositions in this context, and Harris's various strategies to avoid their confirmation, it is also necessary to consider question-answer pairs within the larger sequences of which they are a part. In early work on courtroom discourse, Atkinson & Drew 1979 showed that lawyers typically use question-answer pairs to build a line of questioning. Routinely, a line of questioning begins with a question that merely establishes some fact. Once established, these facts are then used in such a way as to allocate blame or responsibility, to discredit a witness, or to reveal an inconsistency. And often these “facts” are established by lawyers (or there is an attempt to establish these “facts”) in the form of presuppositions. In example (11) below, the lawyer begins by asking Harris whether he is aware that the present Minister of Environment said publicly that her ministry needs more financial and human resources.

To be aware is a factive predicate; therefore, if Harris had answered “yes” or “no” to this question, he would have been confirming the presupposition that the Minister of Environment had indeed made these comments. Harris, however, does not respond with a type-conforming response; rather, in lines 8–10 he repeats the factive predicate in his response (in a postposed position), making the subsequent stretch of talk recognizable as an answer. Notice, however, that in repeating the factive predicate Harris also transforms the presupposition of the original question. That is, rather than confirming the presupposition that Witmer said publicly that her ministry needs more financial and human resources, Harris says that he is aware that there was a press report to that effect. Such an answer, and the subsequent wrangling over whether Harris was directly aware of Witmer's comments, works to break up and delay the progress of the larger sequence that the lawyer is attempting to build step by step. A few lines later, in 16–18 (after Harris says explicitly that he is not sure what the minister said), the lawyer attempts once again to advance the same line of questioning. This time he attempts to establish the “fact” that Witmer made these comments by explicitly naming it as an assumption that his question is predicated upon: But assuming that she said that … would you agree with her. Harris in lines 20–25 again withholds a type-conforming response, ultimately saying that he is not in a position to judge that. On the face of it, Witmer's comments are not damaging or discrediting in any obvious way. Yet Harris, in part through his repeating of factive predicates and his concomitant transforming of presuppositions, effectively stalls the progress of this line of questioning and the larger course of action the lawyer seeks to implement.

RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS WITH NON-FACTIVE PREDICATES

As further evidence of Harris's orientation to the role of type-conforming responses in the preservation of damaging presuppositions of lawyers' questions, we now turn to consider the quite different responses he produced to questions that did not contain factive predicates. Consider examples (12a) and (12b) below.

Both of these examples contain questions with the non-factive predicate agree with. Moreover, in both cases the complements of these predicates contain material that is potentially harmful to Harris's claim that he was unaware of the risks his budgetary policies (i.e., cuts) could have on public health and the environment of Ontario. The question in (12a) asks Harris whether a change in water-testing law post-Walkerton constitutes an admission on the part of the Conservative Party government that such a law should have been in effect at the time of the Walkerton tragedy. The question in (12b) asks whether it was misleading on the part of the Conservative government to suggest that cuts to the Ministry of Environment would not lower environmental protection in Ontario. Thus, note that if either of these propositions had been embedded under a factive predicate such as be aware, they would have been understood as presupposed, (i.e., “Are you aware that the passing of this law in August of 2000 is an acknowledgment that the regulation should have been there in May of 2000?”; “Are you aware that this statement ‘without lowering the current high level of environmental protection in Ontario’ is misleading at best?”); moreover, a type-conforming response from Harris to such sentences would have left the damaging presuppositions intact. Embedded under a non-factive predicate, however (as they are above), these propositions are not presupposed and not taken for granted by the questions. And, consistent with the analysis presented here, Harris's answers in (12a) and (12b) neither address nor deny the embedded propositions directly, nor do they repeat the predicate and rework the content of the complement clauses. Rather, they convey disagreement through a type-conforming response – a response that in this context effectively denies the truth of the damaging propositions. Thus, by the design of his answer (type-conforming vs. non-type-conforming, with predicate repeated or without) Harris displays his own orientation to the particular challenge that questions containing factive predicates pose for a witness in this context.