Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 6
This section examines the opposite problem, things that aren’t perceived as
bridging but unfortunately would be treated as such if we consistently look for
relationships such as those outlined in Table 10.
If bridging NPs regularly have multiple anchors in the context, then are the
definite NPs identified in the corpus as new characterized by their lack of
relationships to the text? How new are those examples identified as new(N)? Look
at the example below, where the speaker is describing how he prepares before he
attends a play.
(17) (3-5a 212)
Speaker A: I sort of read A:[the play] before I go to see it usually. I like to study it a
week before, and then take B:[my impressions] to the play...
Here, B:[my impressions] was tagged by both annotators as new(N), though on
reflection it is clear that it can be further modified as ‘the impressions I get from
reading a play before I go to see it,’ or ‘my impressions from the study of the play,’
and could easily be considered to be bridged to A:[the play] or to the seeing event.
Let’s examine another example.
(18) (3-5a 49)
Speaker A after . Murder in the Cathedral he wrote a - preface {didn’t he} of some
sort saying that - he was trying to bring {poetry} back into [@m] .
drama . but . I don’t think . he succeeded at all
Speaker B you don’t
Speaker A no . [ae?] I think you can tell in Murder in the Cathedral - especially [?i]
you see if you’ve heard it [@m?@] I I once acted in Murder in the
Cathedral . and [@m] . mean the A:[the poetry], especially the
choruses really drives home in that - you can tell
Here A:[the poetry] is tagged as new, but again, it could be related to many of the
different semantic individuals or events introduced in the previous discourse. This
is similar for most of the examples tagged as new(N). And indeed, I re-examined all
the examples tagged as new(N) by both annotators and I have come to the
conclusion that there are seldom examples that cannot be interpreted either as 1)
related to the earlier discourse, but in a way that is difficult to describe and predict,
as in the example above, or 2) seems to be something that is well known to the
discourse participants, and here many of the examples of NPs modified by
possessives can be found, such as references to “your application,” or “your little
girl.” Also, “your English” is clearly related to the context of the discourse, and
things like “my father” are quite predictable. Possessives seem to be more
integrated in the discourse record by their very nature than definite noun phrases
because they not only introduce a new object/individual, but also relate it to
someone else in the discourse context.
Not all relationships are consciously perceived, and whether or not they are
seems to be dependent on the interpreter. There was one consistent difference
between the author and the second annotator worth commenting on. The second
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