Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
Dahl & Hellman (1995) 5 identify three different referent creating operations,
noting that their list is by no means exhaustive. Summation, or Complex Creation is the
first operation they discuss. These terms describe anaphoric reference to split
antecedents or even a list or a series of propositions. Type-coercion, or type-shifting,
presented earlier, is the second operation they discuss. Finally, they identify the two
operations of Abstraction and Substitution. Abstraction is when an anaphor can refer to
the generic interpretation of a specific event or situation given in the antecedent.
Substitution includes anaphoric relationships such as sloppy identity as well as cases
where the same predicate is present in the antecedent and the anaphoric
expression, but where the arguments are switched.
Before answering these question some of the corpus examples of bound
presuppositions will be presented. This will illustrate their basic form and frequency
as well as show how complicated the resolution task is.
4.2 ANTECEDENTS IN THE CORPUS
In order to evaluate the similarities and differences between anaphoric binding and
presuppositional binding the relationships between the potential antecedent and the
presupposed information in the corpus were examined. The method used was
described in chapter 3 but is repeated here. First the presupposition induced by the
triggering expression was determined. Then the transcript from the beginning of
the recording until the triggering expression was examined for the same, or similar
information as the presupposed material. The main criterion for identifying a
potential antecedent was the similarity of contributed information. The results are
presented in Table 3 for abstract triggers and in
Table 4 for definite descriptions.
In Table 3 the total number of induced presuppositions for each trigger type
found is given along with the number of examples from each type identified as
binding. Note that for definite NPs, the results from both annotators are given, the
first annotator given on the left (the author) labeled 1 st , and the second annotator
given on the right in the shaded column labeled 2 nd . Except for the demonstrative
NPs the percentages for binding in each category were quite similar for both
annotators.
5 Eckert & Strube (2000) have compared the process of referent-creation to that of
accommodation, though this is different from the way in which accommodation is used in the
anaphoric theory of presupposition. For presuppositional accommodation, new information is
added to the discourse record, but in referent-coercion, information already given in the
discourse, which is generally also currently salient and activated, is considered in a new way.
67