Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

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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 172
Between Binding and Accommodation annotator often tagged as new (N) examples that the author identified as described (D). This is similar to Poesio & Vieira’s results, where they remark that in their study that the second most frequent sourced of disagreement was between coreferential examples and bridging. This also points to differences between interpreters and the difficulty in distinguishing new information from related information. This shouldn’t be a surprising result, though it is contrary to recent revelations that definite NPs are used at least half the time to introduce information not already part of the discourse, and do not always function with an anaphoric meaning as often believed (Fraurud 1990, Poesio & Vieira 1998). Note that there also may be some differences between spoken and written language. Fraurud’s study of NPs in Swedish and Poesio & Vieira’s (1998) work are both based on written language. Written language probably has more big NPs. Big NPs are well known to often introduce new information and are often easily perceived as such because their additional descriptive content makes them more specific. The definite NPs in the spoken dialogues here tended to be very short. However, discourse is expected to be coherent, and we usually understand presupposition as a way to present information that is being treated as backgrounded, or at least treated as if it is partly known. Assertion is the normal means of presenting new information, it seems logical that partially known information is introduced into the discourse by presupposition. The question we should be asking is whether or not there is an objectively identifiable difference between definite NPs that are perceived as new and those that are perceived as related and how can we add this crucial information to our definition of bridging. If we try to apply the methods proposed for analyzing bridging examples we will greatly overgenerate the number of definite NPs classified as bridging with those perceived so by subjects, and this points to something wrong with the definition of bridging that we are using. 6.3.3 Multiple links possible to the same anchor Just as there may be multiple anchors, it is also possible that there may be multiple links; that is, there may be several reasons for identifying the bridging NP as related to a particular anchor. 23 examples were classified as related (R) by both annotators. 14 of these examples were identified as having the same linguistic expression in the discourse as the source of the anchor. When there was agreement about the anchor, however, this does not mean there was only one method by which to identify the link, and for some examples, many of the approaches presented would have worked. We see a simple example of this in (19) below. (19) (3-5a 339) Interviewer B How many times does the ghost appear in Hamlet? Speaker A I played A: [the ghost], um, (laughs) I should know that. (several lines) Interviewer B Why do you think he why why does he appear in the closet scene? Speaker A Now now this is something I couldn’t understand but I had to play this in haem-, B:[this part]. 173
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Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse
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Abstract Naturally produced example
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5.3.2 Lack of expression alternativ
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irrational. Very warm thanks to Jul
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Chapter 1 work about presupposition
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Chapter 1 There are three core char
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Data and Method Speaker B. Speaker
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Accommdation Binding Total number o
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Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

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