Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 4
(1) The doctor and the patient were discussing a method of treatment. He tried to
explain everything in layman’s terms.
World knowledge tells us that doctors usually explain and that the layman is most
likely the patient, so the most likely antecedent for he based on this information is
the doctor. The information predicated about the referent of he helps us
determined its antecedent.
The following example shows how rhetorical relationships about what is
most likely can also help disambiguate between two potential antecedents.
(2) The mother1 helped her daughter2 pick out a dress.
a. She2 wanted to look nice.
b. She1 wanted her to look nice.
In both the a-sentence and the b-sentence it would be possible to resolve she to the
mother or the daughter. However, because the previous discourse is about a
mother choosing a dress for the daughter, the she in the a-sentence is most plausibly
resolved to the daughter, because the daughter is the one who is getting a new
dress, and this gives us a coherent explanation for what is going on in the first
sentence. In the b-sentence the most likely interpretation is that she refers to the
mother, who is helping the daughter to look nice. This also gives us an explanation
for the event in the first sentence. In each case, the most plausible resolution is the
resolution that gives us the most coherent discourse. In this way identifying
antecedents is guided by the interpreter’s desire to choose antecedents that make
sense in the discourse.
Additionally, identifying antecedents is sometimes aided by the information
predicated about the anaphor, or because in the context only one individual has
been discussed as performing a certain action.
Another way in which the number of potential antecedents may be limited is
by the form of the anaphoric expression. This may also reflect how activated its
referent is in the discourse. This view of anaphora is present in the work of Ariel
(1991) in her accessibility hierarchy and Gundel et al.’s (1993) givenness hierarchy.
Generally, the less descriptive content an anaphoric expression has, the more
salient or activated the information it is referring to is considered to be and will be
considered after the referential act. Therefore pronominal anaphors are believed to
be, with their limited descriptive content, most likely to have been used to refer to
salient individuals and also most influenced by linear recency.
The relationship between activation and anaphoric reference has led to an
alternative characterization of the role of anaphoric expressions in discourse, one
that emphasizes their discourse structuring function. This view is advocated most
clearly in the work of Sidner (1983), and Fox (1987). In this perspective, anaphora
is seen as serving a greater role than just identifying referents in an efficient
manner, attributing them with the ability to actively contribute to a hierarchical
discourse structure.
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