Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Between Binding and Accommodation
6 Between Binding and
Accommodation
The past two chapters presented and analyzed the easily categorized cases of
presupposition resolution. But this gives an overly simplistic picture of the great
variety of relationships between presuppositions and the discourse context.
Specifically, much of the information that is presupposed is actually partially given
or is strongly related to information already in the discourse. These examples
require an analysis that identifies how they are partially related to the discourse
context, while still recognizing the new information contributed by their presence,
i.e. an analysis that could be characterized as being between binding and
accommodation.
Clear cases in point are found among definite NPs, where examples of
bridging or indirect anaphors defy the neat interpretations of binding or
accommodation.
In this chapter I will first present some of the different definitions and
proposals that have been made for resolving bridging inferences. This will provide
the background necessary to understand the discussion of the corpus examples.
Current approaches to bridging have generally worked under the assumption that
for a given bridging anaphor, it is possible to determine a unique anchor and a
unique explanation for how the anchor could or should be identified, i.e. the type
of link intended to be generated and perceived to exist between the bridging NP
and its anchor.
However, earlier corpus annotation work on written text and the annotation
of the spoken data presented here reveals that many bridging examples in coherent
discourse have multiple anchors; that interpreters have differing intuitions as to
which anchor is most appropriate; and finally, that the link between a bridging
anaphor and its antecedent can often be recognized and understood by using
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