Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 6
different from example (21) where the brakes in some way are predictable from the
car.
(22) I walked into the room. The chandeliers sparkled brightly.
I am not sure if examples like (22) should be subsumed under the notion of
bridging at all. However, the relationship room-chandelier does fulfill the three
requirements for the subgroup of bridging NPs I identified. This is unfortunate,
because it shows that these criteria are not precise enough to make a distinction
between examples that seem to be more new than bridged. Inducible parts are less
related to the context than e.g. necessary parts and bear a strong resemblance to the
examples found in the group that annotators generally identify as new(N).
However, the characterization of bridging as licensed by the context in which
it appears, and not by a unique discourse individual does help distinguish this
example from other more prototypical examples of bridging. I would argue that we
cannot consider the chandelier to be licensed by the context because this context is
too poor. A richer context would probably add information about the room
making it more likely and more clear that it is the type of room that is likely to have
a chandelier.
Perhaps the number of anchors that can be identified for a particular bridging
NP distinguishes those that are bridging from those that are actually
accommodated. Those bridging NPs that are only loosely related to their context
may be those perceived as new rather than related. This is a question that future
work should address.
6.5 CONCLUSIONS
Summarizing, naturally produced examples of bridging NPs are often related to
several anchors in the discourse context rather than to one unique anchor as is
usually assumed. These definite NPs should more appropriately be considered to
be licensed by the context in which they are used rather than by one unique
individual. The understanding of bridging as being related to only one individual in
the context is an effect caused by the practice of using examples with a poor or
non-existent context to illustrate bridging. This new analysis accounts for the
difficulty found in getting a high degree of agreement in definite NP annotation
tasks.
Additionally there are good reasons to reflect on what types of relationships
should be considered bridging. The original taxonomy seems to encompass an
extremely heterogeneous group, many of which are currently treated by different
methods. There seem to be three characteristics are associated with prototypical
bridging examples: They are 1) related semantically to the context in which they are
used, 2) require an inference for their resolution and 3) are marked as
presuppositional. On the basis of these characteristics some subgroups considered
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