Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions
antecedent on the top of the stack, the use of the anaphoric expression may itself
be triggering a “pop” of the stack. This work has been discussed extensively as a
computational modal for discourse that can help in resolving anaphors.
Asher & Lascarides (1998b) proposal is the only one I know of that claims
explicitly that hierarchical structure of discourse will also constrain the availability
of antecedents for bound presuppositions. In their (1998b) model, as presented in
section 2.5.2, presuppositions are always bound via a rhetorical relation to another
discourse utterance – this is the attachment site. They argue that only attachment
sites on the right frontier of the discourse structure will be available. In this way
they also believe to constrain the binding ability of presuppositions in a way that
improves upon van der Sandt (1992) by limiting the number of possible
antecedents.
One of the main arguments for the need to consider discourse structure
hierarchical is evidence from return pops. These are the cases mentioned above
where it seems that speakers return to a focus space or context possibly linearly
quite distant from the anaphor but seemingly without processing difficulties. The
idea is that the antecedent is perhaps conceptually closer because the topic or
context where it first appeared is on the right frontier or at the top of the stack
after the pop. The following example illustrates a return pop with a personal
pronoun in naturally produced dialogue (taken from Fox, 1987, p. 30).
(25) Example of return pop with personal pronoun
Speaker A: Oh, my mother wants to know how’s your grandmother.
Speaker B: Uh, I don’t know. I guess she’s al, she’s alright . She went to the
uh hospital again today.
Speaker A: Mmm?
Speaker B: And I guess today was the day she’s supposed to find out if she
goes in or not.
Speaker A: Oh. Oh.
Speaker B: Because they’re gonna do the operation on the tear duct first,
before they do the cataracts.
Speaker A: Mm-hm. Right. Yeah.
Speaker B: So I don’t know. I haven’t you know, she wasn’t home by the,
you know, when I left for school today.
Speaker A: Mm hm.
Speaker B: Tch. So uh, I don’t know.
Speaker A. Mmm.
Speaker B: Well my aunt went with here anyway this time.
Speaker A: Mm, hm.
Speaker B: My mother didn’t go.
Speaker A: Mmm.
Speaker B: But uh, I don’t know. She probably has to go in soon though.
Here the last she refers to the grandmother, and the analysis given by Fox (1987) is
that it does not even refer to the most recent mention of the grandmother, but the
mention in the section marked above the horizontal line, where the topic is the
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