Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 6
they also are usually relationships that would be difficult to resolve using in a
bridging relationship if the link is not explicitly marked. This is perhaps because
many of the examples where the bridging NP is explicitly marked with of it, are
qualitatively different than those without. Poesio et al. (1997) consider this a special
group and refers to them as ‘restrictive post-modification definites,’ remarking that
it presents special problems for analysis in that it is easy to identify the anchor, but
hard to describe the link to the bridging NP. The NPs in these cases could seldom
function well with a bridging interpretation in a context where the link isn’t
explicitly marked. One example of this found in the corpus was the precision of it,
where it referred to Latin. It is possible to identify the precision of it as related to Latin
but it is difficult to make the same type of bridge between Latin in one utterance
and the precision in another without additional clues. This is because the link between
the two elements is not conventional, lexically or encyclopedically. That the link is
not conventional may be one of the reason behind the use of the modifier, it
provides an explicit clue to the relationship. Additionally, because their resolution
does not really involve inferences they differ from Clark’s description of the
bridging process. This also strongly suggests that these examples are qualitatively
different from other bridging examples. Many have anchors that come after the
bridging NP, which is why Poesio et al. (1997) identify them as restrictive postmodification
definites. This means they are not backwards referring, i.e. also
differing greatly from most anaphoric expressions.
Third, I think there should be a distinction made between semantic
individuals introduced via presuppositions and those introduced via assertion. In
their definition of bridging, Asher & Lascarides (1998a) make the point that the
same type of information will be needed to make an inference between some
indefinites and the context, as between definite NPs and the context. Therefore,
these indefinites should be treated by the same method. But this confuses method
of resolution with the semantic category of the information which needs to be
resolved and also ignores speaker intentions in generation. Asserted and
presupposed information may be related to the context in ways that seem
superficially similar but their semantic contributions are clearly different. Treating
indefinites and definites in a similar manner ignores the information contributed by
the article. 14 Indefinite NPs are qualitatively different in their relationship to the
context in that they are not signaled by any marking as anaphoric.
Finally, reference to abstract objects does not fit well with the requirements
proposed above for three reasons. First, they are referring to abstract objects and
not concrete individuals. They could therefore be considered a kind of co-reference
relationship, but of a form where there can be semantic type changes that are
instigated by the form of the referring expression. Second, there are already very
well thought out proposals for dealing with these examples. The means by which
14 It is generally agreed that indefinites and definites have different functions in English, the
language studied here. If it were not an important distinction, then we could do away with
definite and indefinite marking which many languages do, but it is also generally acknowledged
that they then communicate the same information by other means.
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