Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Between Binding and Accommodation
inferences involve world knowledge and cannot be resolved solely by linguistic or
lexical means. The stopping rule refers to the requirement that hearers make a short,
plausible bridge. Clark (1975, p. 419) gives the following example of how the
stopping rule works with a concurrence:
(4) Alex went to a party last night. He’s going to get drunk again tonight.
Here a bridge has to be built between the presupposition triggered by again and the
previous context, i.e. the induced presupposition that Alex got drunk at sometime
previous to now. But there is no mention of an earlier drinking event with which
this presupposition could bind. Instead, interpreters are argued to assume that the
earlier drinking event was at the party last night. However, another explanation
could be that after parties, where Alex generally resolves not to drink at all, he goes
to casinos where he gambles and loses, gets upset, and ends up drinking. This
bridge is less plausible and certainly longer than just identifying the earlier drinking
event as something that happened at the party. Thus, the stopping rule is what
compels the interpreter to stop making inferences when a plausible bridge has been
found. Clark also believes that “The listener assumes ... that the speaker intended
him to be able to compute a unique bridge from his previous knowledge to the
intended antecedent…”, (Clark, 1975, p. 420) and that “in natural discourse bridges
are always determinate.”
Given this very free initial definition it is not surprising that later researchers
have focused on different subgroups of the examples introduced in Clark’s (1975)
paper. But a consequence of this is that discussions of bridging are often
incompatible because of large differences in the type of data analyzed. A key
question to consider is whether or not these relationships make up a uniform group
that can be successfully treated by the same or similar methods. Currently, many of
the groups identified in Clark’s original definition are generally treated by different
methods, e.g. pronominal reference, co-referential NPs with identical head nouns,
abstract anaphoric reference and rhetorical relationships. This may be because they
actually involved very different relationships between the anaphoric expression and
their antecedents and the discourse.
6.1.1 Bridging and Presuppositions
Examples of bridging are found both with concrete and abstract presupposition
triggers, as shown in Clark’s inventory. However, the clearest cases of bridging are
found among the definite NPs, and it is also here where most effort has been spent
on finding systematic ways to resolve bridging NPs. Therefore, the rest of this
chapter will concentrate on bridging relationships between the presuppositions
triggered by definite NPs and the discourse context, and how these induced
presuppositions should be treated in the binding theory of presuppositions. I will
also present corpus evidence that bridges are often not determinate, contrary to
Clark’s account, and discuss implications for the analysis of such examples.
155