Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
Fox (1987) discusses these two perspectives on anaphors describing them as
being used in one of two modes, the “context-determines-use” mode or in the
“use-accomplishes-context” mode (p. 16). “Context-determines-use” reflects the
examples where the appropriate form of a referential expression is limited by the
particular context where it is used. The “use-accomplishes-context” mode is where
the use of a particular form actually creates discourse structure either by signaling
the beginning of a new discourse segment, or signaling the end of one, e.g. the use
of a full form reference to an already given discourse individual may signal a change
in structure, or the use of a highly reduced anaphoric expression may signal the
continuation of a discourse segment. Anaphors and discourse structure are
considered to be in a co-dependent relationship, and it is possible to talk of the
same example from the perspective of both modes. This is often necessary as well,
because it is quite difficult to say if it is the use of an anaphor for reference in the
context that increases the salience of the context or if the activation of the context
by other factors that increases the salience of the referent.
Anaphoric relationships between concrete individuals that are co-referential
are fairly straightforward. But we can also have relationships of non-identity,
including, quantified noun phrases, plural pronouns, subset relationships,
summarizing relationships, and relationships where the anaphoric expression refers
to more than one semantic individual. Knowing specifically how these relationships
are resolved is not necessary for understanding the further discussion. Procedures
for handling these kinds of anaphoric reference in DRT are spelled out in van
Deemter (1992) as well as in Kamp & Reyle (1993), for the interested reader.
In the further discussion, the great number of problems associated with
pronominal reference to abstract objects are very relevant, because a majority of
the triggers studied here presuppose what semantically are abstract objects (e.g.
aspectual verbs, it-clefts, factives and too). This type of anaphor has been called
many different things in the literature, e.g. discourse deixis (Webber 1991, Eckert &
Strube, 2000), situation anaphora (Fraurud, 1992), and abstract object anaphora, by
Asher (1993). All these terms are used to refer to anaphoric reference to situations,
facts, events, propositions, specific utterances, as well as more deictic functions
referring to the information contribution of a discourse segment (particularly
common with the term ‘discourse deixis’). Unfortunately, many of these
theoretically distinctive uses are difficult to distinguish in practice. Additional
complications result because these anaphoric relationships often involve what is
called type-coercion or type-shifting. This is where an abstract object of one semantic
type, for example an event, serves as an antecedent for an anaphoric reference of
an abstract object of another semantic type, such as a fact, a phenomenon well
known from Vendler (1967) and later Asher (1993). Consider the following
example where a semantic event is later referred to with an abstract object anaphor
in the complement of a factive, which should be considered to take a fact as an
antecedent. However, this fact is derived from the event introduced by the
underlined sentence.
65