Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 1
There are three core characteristics that bridging anaphora are generally
associated with and can be used to delimit the examples we treat as bridging.
Briefly, they should 1) add a new semantic individual, 2) be related to the context
through some type of inference and 3) be marked as anaphoric. This specification
streamlines the set of relationships identified as bridging, and removes some
subgroups, such as pronouns and co-referential NPs that are better treated by
different means. The resulting group is more homogeneous and can potentially be
handled by the same method. I will argue that we need to modify the binding
theory to correctly analyze these examples by adding an additional category for
their resolution, so that we end up with three resolution strategies, binding, bridging,
and accommodation.
The rest of the thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 2 introduces the
concept of presupposition with examples, followed by a historical overview. After
this, the binding theory of presupposition (van der Sandt 1992) is presented along
with an introduction to its competitor, the satisfaction theory. Finally, I will
describe some extensions of, and variations upon the binding theory that are
referred to later in the thesis. Chapter 3 presents some of the advantages in using
corpus data, especially spoken data, for analyzing presuppositions. Here I also
briefly introduce the corpus, how it was analyzed as well as what could not be taken
into account in the analysis.
Chapter 4 looks at bound presuppositions in relation to the claim that
presuppositions are anaphors. Here, I examine examples from the corpus to see if
they display the behavior typical of discourse anaphora.
Chapter 5 discusses the more theoretical claims having to do with
presupposition accommodation in relation to the corpus results. Chapter 6 focuses
on definite NPs, especially on bridging NPs, NPs whose referents are discoursenew,
but are strongly related to other information in the discourse.
Finally, chapter 7 draws some general conclusions about the results
presented in the earlier chapters, comments on the implications of the results and
conclusions in the previous chapter to our understanding of presupposition and
discourse. I will also give some ideas for future work, which might be able to
answer some of the questions brought up which could only be briefly mentioned in
this work.
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