Wait a minute! What kind of discourse strategy is this?

Christopher Potts

Work involving the Wait a minute test for presuppositions would benefit from a larger empirical basis. This is an attempt to help provide one: a lightly annotated collection of 439 examples, drawn from 77 million words of CNN television transcripts. Below is a Javascript interface to the collection. This write-up has more on the motivation, data, and tags, along with a call for more investigation.

Download the full data set in XML, the notes, and the Javascript interface

Search type match all terms match at least one term
Status of content Wait a minute responds to Form of the Wait a minute follow-up
appropriateness declarative
at-issue content imperative
discourse conditions interrogative
presupposition/implicature rising declarative
unclear vocative

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Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Last update: 2008-11-16