Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Between Binding and Accommodation
Below I try to motivate what types of examples should be considered
bridging by identifying three characteristics that I believe we generally associate
with the prototypical examples and then use these characteristics to exclude from
the inventory relationships that have very different characteristics. The
relationships that remain, because they share these three core characteristics, also
often share other qualities and could be treated by similar methods. The reader can
compare these characteristics to those given by Clark (1975) and listed in 6.1.
1) Their resolution should require an inference, using non-
discourse-given knowledge.
2) They should need or require the addition of a new reference marker.
3) The bridging NP must be marked as presuppositional, to signal the need
for the inference.
First, pronouns should not be subsumed under this definition of bridging. They do
not contribute new existential information and they do not need non-discoursegiven
information for their resolution. They are also coded for gender and number,
things which play a role in their resolution. They are constrained by discourse
structure, or alternatively can be considered to contribute to structuring discourse
in a way that is quite different from definite NPs. Their interpretation is also clearly
dependent on another discourse individual and not on the context as a whole.
Second, relationship of co-reference should not be considered bridging.
Putting co-reference relationships into the same category as bridging confuses two
very distinct semantic processes – the addition of a new individual to the context
versus retrieving or recognizing an already present individual. Whether or not an
individual is already part of your discourse model is one of the most basic questions
you can ask about a model. Collapsing these two categories blurs a distinction
between existential information and attributive information. Some of the
definitions of bridging presented in the background seem to limit co-reference
bridging to examples where some inference or lexical or world knowledge is
required to identify the anchor. This also confuses two different concepts, the
nature of the relationship and the method or information source you can use to
identify this relationship. If two linguistics expressions refer to the same referent,
then whether it is necessary to use lexical or encyclopedic knowledge to understand
this is an issue that has to do with the decoding process, not the interpretation of
the intended message. And again, the relationship is clearly with another semantic
individual and not with the context.
Other examples that do not require inference should also be removed. This
would then include described (D) type examples, also those classified as unfamiliar
with explanatory modifier by Hawkins (1978). First, these examples all function as
a kind of argument to another constituent. It is the constituent as a whole that has
a relationship with the context. Second, they do not require an inference because
the relationship is explicitly marked. Third, these relationships are often unable to
support an anaphoric relationship on their own. Poesio et al. (1997) observed that
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