Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 6
The binding theory does not really have an approach to bridging and in its
standard form (e.g. van der Sandt 1992) will treat bridging anaphors by
accommodation. Other ways to analyze bridging examples in the binding theory are
most coherently discussed in Geurts (1999). He is quite ambivalent about the need
to determine whether bridging should fall under the category of binding or
accommodation, pointing out that for many examples, both processing strategies
seem to be possible. Either a referent given in the discourse can act as an anchor,
and license the creation of a new reference marker to which the presupposed
information can be bound, or the definite description can be accommodated, and
after accommodation this information can be related to the rest of the discourse
record. Relating accommodated information to the discourse record is often part of
the ‘wish list’ of what should be in an adequate representation of accommodation,
but has yet to be developed. Geurts also points out that the interpretation that
results from binding the bridging NP, or the interpretation that results from
accommodating the bridging NP, will often be the same. This makes it difficult to
say that one resolution strategy is preferred to the other.
Identification of the anchor of a bridging NP does become essential in cases
where the anchor occurs in an embedded context. Failure to recognize the
connection leads to global accommodation, which sometimes results in an
incorrect interpretation. For example,
(5) If Drew buys a new car, he’ll ruin the brakes within a year with his crazy
driving.
If the presupposition associated with the brakes is accommodated it will become
part of the global context. But clearly the brakes are part of the new car which is
hypothetical, so the brakes needs to be hypothetical too. This is why the analysis
either has to bind to an inferred referent in the antecedent of the conditional, or be
accommodated within the antecedent of the conditional.
The problem is that there is no clear reason to block global accommodation.
We might be able to say that the resulting discourse will not be coherent, but it will
fulfill the requirement of informativity, e.g. There are brakes. If Drew buys a new car,
he’ll ruin the brakes within a year with his crazy driving, is not uninformative, just not very
coherent. Global accommodation does not result in inconsistency, nor would it
result in what would technically be an ill-formed DRS because of trapping
However, the relationships between the brakes and car do seem to be similar to the
kind of implicit trapping discussed in section 5.1.3, because we want to interpret the
brakes as the brakes of Drew’s new car.
If we choose to “bind,” then we still have to add a new reference marker for
the brakes, a procedure that seems to clearly fit with the description of
accommodation. In this way binding would here be quite different from normal
binding, where a referent is identified with an already given reference marker.
Geurts (1999) also considers the possibility that the binding theory could be
modified to put such examples into a third category for resolution, bridging, where
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