Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Between Binding and Accommodation
Category Annotator 1 Annotator 2
Type of NP Total Def Dem Poss Total Def Dem Poss
Binding 137 78 27 32 113 67 16 30
Accommodation 115 56 9 50 155 82 10 63
Bridging (R,D) 130 92 29 10 90 60 16 14
C 29 22 4 3 32 26 5 1
Removed (K,E,O) 28 29 2 7 49 32 8 9
Total 439 267 55 117 439 267 55 117
Table 13 Tags collapsed to binding theory categories
C:[my place] was identified with B:[your place], i.e. it was considered co-referential,
D:[this family] was considered new to the discourse (though it is likely to be known
to the two interviewers). E:[the last few months] is a time that must be calculated
from the time of the discourse and as such was marked as calculable(C) by both
annotators. B:[your place] was considered by both annotators to be related(R) to
the noun phrase marked A:[a sort of housekeeper]. It is this final relationship that is
most similar to the prototypical examples of bridging found in the theoretical
literature.
How well would the proposals discussed earlier fare in resolving this last
example, i.e., the relationship between A:[a sort of housekeeper] and B:[your place]?
The approaches that advocate using lexical or encyclopedic knowledge resources
will have trouble identifying this link, because there does not seem to be any clear
lexical or encyclopedic relationship. The proposal based on defining the link more
functionally would seem to work better. There is a clear parallelism between the
interviewer’s question in (a) and the second question in (c), where it seems as if he
is asking for confirmation that his question was answered by Speaker A’s statement
in (b). This clarifying question is also perhaps a necessary grounding action given
the overlapping speech marked with underlining between the asterisks. We can also
see that the who in (c) is not a question adverb but the who of a relative clause that
continues the statement in (a). As in “as a sort of housekeeper who can take your
place” which is could be paraphrased as “This means that you’ve got somebody
lined up who can take your place as a sort of housekeeper” This is an example
where the utterance containing the anchor and the utterance containing the
bridging NP are in a rhetorical relationship that could either support or be
supported by the identification of the bridging relationship.
An example where the link is easily determined by the surface characteristics
of the noun phrase is given in (12). This sequence takes place at the end of the
interview where the interviewer gives Speaker A directions for finding the Tutor
for Women Students.
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