Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 6
(12) (3-1b 1020)
Speaker A Thank you very much and now I have to see the [@] (1)
Speaker B Tutor to Women Students and A: [the secretary] will tell you how to
find her *. all right* (2)
Speaker A *thank you very much* indeed - . (3)
Speaker B Now you know where B: [the secretary’s office] is down
the corridor and she’ll let you know how to . get there (4)
Because of the possessive NP secretary’s, the lexical relationship between office and
secretary is not needed to resolve the bridging NP. The secretary has been
mentioned earlier in (2), and this probably helps bring her into focus and
contributes to the naturalness of the bridging NP. 12 There is also a discourse
relationship between the utterance containing the secretary’s office and (2), because (4)
furthers Speaker B’s goal to give Speaker A enough information to find the Tutor
to Women Students.
There are three ways in which the corpus data seems to differ from the
characterizations of bridging in the approaches presented in section 6.3: bridging
NPs often have multiple anchors, many of the definite NPs identified as discoursenew
are often related to the discourse in the same way as bridging NPs, and there
are often several different ways to bridge the definite NP to a given anchor.
6.3.1 Multiple anchors for many bridging NPs available
As already mentioned, one of the first problems for current theories that becomes
apparent when working with the corpus data is that there are often multiple
anchors for many of the bridging examples. In the following excerpt the
interviewer is giving the interviewee advice about how to prepare for the course she
hopes to be accepted to.
(13) (3-1a 506)
Speaker A Well, what your your best bet is to go to the University Library or write
for C:[the English honours syllabus] - read it and study it - do you
see? Find out what D:[the course] is and then start reading in the
various subjects, um, reading from F:[the recommended texts that
are there printed in the syllabus] and and so prepare yourself for the
degree.
F:[the recommended texts that are there printed in the syllabus] was classified as
related by both annotators, but different anchors were given. The author chose
D:[the course] whereas the second annotator chose C:[the English honours
syllabus]. The restrictive relative clause makes it clear that the recommended texts
are in the syllabus but they are also arguably also a part of the course. Among the
23 examples identified by both annotators as related(R), 9 were cases where the
anchors identified were different. Note that these are not cases where the choice
12
Note however that we seldom consider ‘his house’ to be explicitly linked via the possessive to
the antecedent of the pronoun.
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