Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 6
Both annotators categorized B:[this part] as related to A:.[the ghost]. First, from the
example (which isn’t shown in its entirety) we can see that there could have been
several other relationships that might have been considered possible anchors (e.g.
Hamlet, as in the part in the play), but let us treat the example as if the linguistic
expression identified as the source of the anchor by both annotators is the best
possible anchor.
What kind of relationship is between A:[the ghost] and B:[this part] ? It isn’t
a standard lexical relationship that you would find coded in e.g. WorldNet. It
involves either encyclopedic knowledge that there is a character of a ghost in
Hamlet, or knowledge that Hamlet is a play, the ghost appears in the play, so the
ghost is either an actor or the role played by an actor. In the former case it is a coreference
relationship, but not in the latter. The resolution seems simple but is
quite difficult to describe (see also example 1, NP A:[your place]). Both are played,
and the fact that both are objects of the verb play in the dialogue probably also
plays a role in understanding the link.
World knowledge, in the form of familiarity with the characters in Hamlet
could also help an interpreter understand the multiple links between the same
anchors and bridging anaphor.
We can also ask if there is a kind of coherence relationship that could be
identified here that would support a resolution of the type proposed by Asher &
Lascarides? For example, the speaker is admitting that he doesn’t have an
explanation for the question posed by Interviewer B, about why the ghost appears
in the closet scene. The proposition Now now this (=why the ghost appears in the closet
scene) is something I couldn’t understand) is rhetorically related by some kind of
contrastive, to the utterance that follows it, e.g. I had to play this part. Resolving this
part to the ghost is necessary for making sense of the relationship between the two
propositions.
These different methods by which to identify the relationship are probably
necessary to add redundancy to the message. Every interpreter may not have access
to all the information necessary to recognize all the possible reasons for identifying
the link at the time that a bridging anaphor is used. Many examples also illustrate
that different interpreters rely on different information sources to make a link in
order to identify an anchor. This is most obvious in examples where the
information available to the annotator and the discourse participants is clearly
different. The example below is taken from the very beginning of an interview,
where the interviewer is asking the potential student about the time that she will
have available for study:
(20) (3-1b 592)
Speaker -a [@] and what about A:[your little girl] -~|
Clearly, as the speaker is introducing the individual referred to, he already knows
about her existence, and at least one other discourse participant knows the referent
to this NP (the addressee is her mother!) but the individual is new to the annotator,
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