Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 6
respectively. In other words, there was more disagreement than agreement about
when a definite description was related to another reference marker by bridging.
These experiments show that it is difficult to arrive at any real consensus on
what definite NPs should be recognized as bridging and the second most frequent
source of disagreement was between examples classified as co-referential and
examples classified as bridging. There was also disagreement on the anchors for
bridging references. It seems that it is not easy for annotators to categorize
examples in natural data with these taxonomies.
In summary, several methods have been suggested, though the only one that
has been evaluated on a large amount of data, the lexically based approach of
Poesio et al (1997), was not a success. In addition, annotation tasks also show that
annotators have trouble determining if naturally produced NPs are bridging or
binding. A potential conclusion is that we might be on the wrong track altogether
and this is what I will maintain.
6.3 ANNOTATION OF EXAMPLES FROM THE LONDON-LUND CORPUS
In order to see how definite NPs function in spoken dialogue and to obtain corpus
examples that could be examined in detail, I excerpted definite NPs from three of
the transcripts in the LLC. 8 Definite NPs were considered to be NPs introduced
either by a definite article, a demonstrative article, or a possessive. These were then
annotated for anchor and category by myself, and another native speaker of
American English who could be considered ‘linguistically naïve’. This work
complements the earlier mentioned corpus annotation work of Poesio & Vieira
(1998) by providing some data on spoken language examples as well as providing
data on demonstrative NPs and possessives. Each of the three transcribed
conversations was an interview. 9 They had a combined length of approximately
8,972 words and contained 1,029 tone units. Each interview had three participants,
two interviewers who knew each other, and a potential student who met the
interviewers at the time of the recording. The interviewees were all prospective
English honors students and much of the dialogue revolves around their academic
background and preparedness for beginning the course, if they were to be accepted.
The interviewers steer the conversation by asking questions. Participants rarely
make comments unrelated to the task at hand, and this makes identifying references
to private common ground less of an issue.
After a small pilot study, an annotation scheme with eight categories was
developed. These categories were inspired by the semantically-based classification
scheme for definite NPs used in the second annotation task done by Poesio &
Vieira (1998). The categories and their definitions are presented in the table on the
following page.
8 Some of these results were presented in Spenader (2001b).
9 Dialogue 3-1a, dialogue 3-1 b and dialogue 3 5a.
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