Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
Both pronominal singular anaphors and definite NPs are usually used to refer to
concrete discourse-given individuals. Because the idea that definite NPs are
anaphoric is generally accepted, the discussion throughout the chapter will focus on
the more controversial claim that the presuppositions triggered by abstract triggers,
here factives, aspectual verbs, it-clefts and too, are also anaphors. 2
In their survey article on anaphora, Sells & Wasow (1997) offer the following
definition:
“The term ‘anaphora,’ as it has come to be used in modern grammatical theory, encompasses the
phenomena of pronominal reference and various kinds of ellipsis. What these have in common is
that an element or construction is dependent for its interpretation on being associated with
something else in the context.” (p. 207)
This definition of anaphora emphasizes its dependence on the context for its
interpretation. This dependence often is a direct effect of anaphoric expressions
being less specific in form than the construction upon which they depend for their
interpretation. One of the reasons anaphoric expressions are so common is their
low-effort and high-return when used to refer to known and salient information.
Much work on anaphora, especially work within computational linguistics,
has been concerned with the problem of finding the correct antecedent, as well as
accounting for preferences for antecedents in examples that seem to otherwise be
ambiguous. Different pronouns are marked for different features, such as number
or genus of the referent. This provides information that will help the interpreter to
choose a compatible antecedent, but there may be more than one candidate in the
context. 3
The descriptive content associated an anaphoric expression when
introduced, e.g. in a matrix or subordinate clause, or information predicated about
the anaphor, will also aid in the identification of its antecedent. In general, the less
information that is coded on the anaphoric expression itself, the more dependent
the identification of the antecedent will be on the surrounding context in which the
anaphoric expression is being used. The information predicated about the referent
of the anaphoric expression is often a particularly good clue for identifying
antecedents in cases where there is more than one compatible antecedent by
making one interpretation more likely. For example:
2 Some of these results are also discussed in Spenader (to appear).
3 Note that anaphors cannot always be used appropriately in all their different forms and in all
syntactic roles and there are a great number of well-known syntactic constraints on their usage,
discussed at length in e.g. Reinhart (1983). These syntactic constraints affect the choice of
anaphoric forms within sentences, e.g. the antecedent of a reflexive pronoun must generally be
the subject of the sentence in which it is used, and an object pronoun can generally not have the
subject of the same sentence as a potential antecedent. Syntactic constraints function intrasententially
and are not relevant for the discussion here where we are concerned with what has
been called referential discourse anaphora, which are mainly inter-sentential anaphoric relationships.
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