Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 4
None of the triggered presuppositions had binding as the most frequent
interpretation. Presuppositions triggered by definite NPs had antecedents in around
30% of the cases for both annotators. 6 That the primary usage of definite NPs is
not anaphoric reference to something already given in the text has been established
in earlier corpus work of written Swedish by Fraurud (1990) and more recently with
texts from the Wall Street Journal in an annotation task experiment done by Poesio
& Vieira (1998). The figures here confirm this for unrestricted spoken dialogue.
The frequency of binding for factives and aspectual verbs was very low. The
triggers most likely to be resolved by binding are it-clefts and too. In fact, the
presuppositions induced by too were almost exclusively resolved by binding with a
discourse-given antecedent.
Induced presuppositions that are interpreted as bound are meant to be
referring to information already introduced in the discourse. The most basic
requirement placed on a potential antecedent is that the information it contributes
is judged as compatible with the semantic content of the presupposed material.
However, the more descriptive information associated with the triggered
presupposition, the more difficult making this judgment becomes. For triggers that
semantically presuppose an individual, we must try to find in our discourse
representation an individual reference marker that has compatible semantic
features. But for propositions, events, facts, and situations, e.g. abstract objects,
identifying a compatible antecedent is a much harder task. In practice this means
6 Note that in this table the definite NPs that were considered bridging references are counted
separately, and are treated in more detail in chapter 6. This means that the percentage of e.g.
33% binding for definite NPs for the first annotator does not mean 67% accommodation. For
the figures for accommodation see Table 2 or Table 5.
68
Triggering
construction
TOTAL Binding
factive verbs,–obj. comp. 109 28 (26%)
aspectual verbs 68 10 (15%)
it-clefts 31 19 (61%)
too 45 43 (98%)
Table 3 Cases of binding, abstract triggers
Triggering
construction
TOTAL Binding
2 annotators 1st 2nd 1st 2nd
all definite NPs 411 390 137(33%) 113(30%)
definite NPs 248 235 78(31%) 67(28%)
demonstrative NPs 53 47 27(510%) 16(34%)
possessives 110 108 32(29%) 30(28%)
Table 4 Cases of binding - definite descriptions