Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Between Binding and Accommodation
binding would be preferred to bridging, and bridging preferred to accommodation.
However, he does not consider the development of the theory along these lines
helpful for understanding bridging or presupposition. I will argue that this is a
mistake, and that the corpus data suggests that we need a separate category for
bridging inferences.
6.2 APPROACHES TO BRIDGING
Approaches to bridging can be classified roughly into two categories. There are
proposals that depend primarily on lexical or encyclopedic information to resolve
bridging NPs and as a consequence work very well when the link is a lexical
relationship. Additionally, there are proposals that try to find an anchor by
identifying how the presence of the bridging NP helps support some type of
rhetorical relationship between the proposition with the anchor and the
proposition with the bridging NP, termed ‘functional approaches’ below. The
lexically based proposals are mainly aimed at finding methods of analysis that can
be applied to real data with an acceptable (computational) cost. The proponents of
functional proposals often have a larger goal, trying to find a unified account that
will explain how bridging works within a greater theory of communication or
discourse interpretation, further aspiring to be cognitively plausible. Because of
their very different goals, the approaches differ in the definitions used and in what
are seen as the central questions surrounding bridging. In addition to this
theoretical work, there has been some empirical work on bridging NPs, in written
corpus, including some annotation experiments. It is this latter work that actually
raises some questions about the feasibility of either of the two types of approaches.
6.2.1 Lexical or encyclopedic based approaches
A large number of researchers have proposed that bridging inferences can be
resolved by using lexical or encyclopedic knowledge. One method has been to try
to categorize all the different potential linking relationships that can hold between a
bridging anaphor and its anchors, and then using these categories to guide the
search. Most of this work has been part of a more general attempt to categorize the
use and function of definite NPs (work such as Hawkins, 1978, Prince 1981, and
Loebner 1985). As an illustrative example, consider (6), where a lexical or
encyclopedic approach would identify the doors as being in a part-of relationship
with Bart’s new house.
(6) Bart’s new house looked beautiful, but the plastic doors ruined the effect.
The three proposals that will be discussed below are all made by researchers who
want to develop a means to automatically determine the anchors of the definite
NP. Because of this, they are interested in explaining resolving bridging inferences
using knowledge sources that would be available computationally, or with
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