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Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

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Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse Jennifer Spenader Computational Linguistics Department of Linguistics Stockholm University Doctoral dissertation 2002 Department of Linguistics Stockholm University Copyright, Jennifer Spenader, 2002 S - 106 91 Stockholm ISBN 91-7265-477-5 Printed by Akademitryck AB, Edsbruk, Sweden, 2002 Cover drawings: Benny Brodda, Cover design: Elizabeth Spenader Abstract Naturally produced examples of presuppositions in the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English are analyzed using the binding theory of presupposition (van der Sandt 1992), which treats presupposed and anaphoric information in the same way. Presupposed information is either bound to a discourse-given antecedent for its interpretation or creates its own antecedent via accommodation. The corpus data suggests that bound presuppositional expressions are used and perceived similarly to discourse anaphors. Additionally, due to their richer descriptive content, presuppositional expressions referring to abstract objects can fulfill more discourse functions than their anaphoric alternatives, contributing rhetorical effect, referring more precisely to discourse-given information, making conclusions explicit, and serving a summarizing function. These results lend further support to the treatment of presupposed information as anaphoric and confirm the need for a binding analogy to explain their usage in extended discourse. The corpus data also contains naturally produced examples of presupposition accommodation, which provides an empirical base for the discussion of several theoretical proposals related to the phenomena. Factive presuppositions are overwhelmingly used to communicate information believed to be hearer-new. Previous accounts of what licenses accommodation cannot be applied satisfactorily across the board, and the data does not entirely confirm the proposed preference for higher levels of accommodation. Based on the data, it is instead proposed that preferences for accommodation at a certain level may be dependent on embedding and trigger type. Finally, presuppositions strongly related to the context but still new cannot easily be analyzed as binding or accommodation. Typical cases are so-called bridging NPs, which are normally treated as dependent for their interpretation on a unique anchor. However, as the corpus data shows, multiple anchors may be available. Also, consistently applying current definitions of bridging to examples within a rich context generates too many bridging relationships relative to interpreters’ intuitions. I suggest treating such cases as licensed by the context rather than by a single anchor, and furthermore, considering as bridging NPs only those that 1) introduce a new individual in the discourse 2) are related to the context through some type of inference and 3) are marked as anaphoric. The result is a more homogeneous group treatable by a single method and is more motivated on semantic grounds. Key words: presuppositions, anaphors, spoken discourse, corpus study, binding, accommodation 1 Introduction 1 2 Approaches to Presupposition 5 2.1 How do we identify presuppositions? 6 2.2 Earlier Analyses of Presuppositions 12 2.3 Presuppositions as Anaphors 18 2.3.1 Discourse Representation Theory 18 2.3.2 The Binding Theory 24 2.4 The Satisfaction Theory 34 2.5 Variations on the original binding theory 40 2.5.1 Zeevat (1992) 40 2.5.2 Asher & Lascarides (1998b) 41 2.5.3 Bidirectional OT 43 2.6 Summary 47 3 Data and Method 49 3.1 What can we Learn from Corpus Data? 50 3.2 The London Lund Corpus 51 3.3 The excerpted examples and analysis 55 4 Anaphors and Bound Presuppositions 61 4.1 Anaphors and anaphoric binding 62 4.2 Antecedents in the Corpus 67 4.3 Identifying antecedents 74 4.3.1 Bound presuppositions make more precise references to abstract objects 76 4.3.2 Binding relationship adds rhetorical effect to the message 82 4.3.3 Reactions by other participants point to the binding relationship being perceived 86 4.3.4 The binding relationship needs to be perceived to make the discourse coherent 89 4.4 Presuppositions and Global Discourse Structure 89 4.5 Discussion and Conclusions 95 5 Accommodation and Presupposition 99 5.1 Corpus examples of accommodation 100 5.1.1 Accommodation in the Main DRS 102 5.1.2 Global Accommodation 103 5.1.3 Intermediate and Local Accommodation 105 5.2 Accommodated Information from the Perspective of the Discourse Participants 109 5.2.1 Hearer-new or hearer-known from the perspective of the speaker? 112 5.2.2 Discussion 115 5.3 What characteristics support or hinder ease or tendency to accommodate? 117 5.3.1 Descriptive content licenses accommodation 119 5.3.2 Lack of expression alternatives licenses accommodation 121 5.3.3 Corpus Data and Discussion 132 5.4 Is there a preference for higher levels of accommodation? 138 5.5 Summary 149 6 Between Binding and Accommodation 151 6.1 What is bridging? 152 6.1.1 Bridging and Presuppositions 155 6.2 Approaches to bridging 157 6.2.1 Lexical or encyclopedic based approaches 157 6.2.2 Functional based approaches 160 6.2.3 Empirical work 162 6.3 Annotation of examples from the London-Lund Corpus 164 6.3.1 Multiple anchors for many bridging NPs available 168 6.3.2 Not all theoretically possible links are perceived 171 6.3.3 Multiple links possible to the same anchor 173 6.4 Discussion 175 6.5 Conclusions 180 7 Conclusions and implications 183 7.1 Future work 186 Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to Bart Geurts, my official assistant supervisor, and Rob van der Sandt, without whose help I would not have been able to write this thesis. After two shorter visits, Bart and Rob invited me to come and write my dissertation at Nijmegen University during 2001-2002. They made me most welcome, both in the department and in their homes. I am very grateful to Rob for explaining to me what a dissertation is, for getting me to see what mine could be, as well as for spending countless hours discussing the literature and my own work with me and for wise advice every step of the way. I am very grateful to Bart Geurts for answering my countless questions, reading several drafts of all the chapters, and for giving very clear, specific and practical advice on how to proceed at every stage. I thank you both for teaching me all the things I should have known and didn’t, and then some. Anyone would be lucky to have one of you as a supervisor; I was even luckier to have you both! My thanks also go to Östen Dahl for meticulously reading and commenting on every page of this dissertation, which hopefully made many of the ideas more accessible to a wider audience. Östen’s obvious enthusiasm for each of my small successes during the three years for which he was official supervisor was always a source of encouragement. My very warm thanks also go to Henk Zeevat. He has been an active source of encouragement since we met, and the hours he has spent discussing with me have made me more confident about expressing my own ideas. Several people read and commented on articles on which some of the work here is based, or on part of the thesis or on seminars based on this work. Special thanks to Emiel Krahmer who commented on several papers. Thanks also to Reinhard Blutner, Lars Borin, Benny Brodda, Kees van Deemter, Sofia Gustafson- Capková, Helen de Hoop and Natalia Nygren Modjeska. In Stockholm, several people have been a continued source of support. Most important among these is my officemate Sofia Gustafson-Capková, whose has always provided a calming and cheerful presence, as well as an enthusiastic discussion partner. Moral support and good advice has also been generously provided by Gudrun Göransson, Päivi Juvonen and Ljuba Veselinova. For moral support during my stay in Nijmegen I especially wish to thank Hanneke van der Grinten, Emar Maier and Frank Verdonk. I also wish to thank the Geurts–Wolfhagen family for adopting me into their family during my nearly six months in the Netherlands, during which time I wrote most of this dissertation. Special thanks here to Marlon Wolfhagen for making that time so gezellig as well as for very sensible advice when I was most irrational. Very warm thanks to Julia and Mattijs Geurts, who not only taught me Dutch, but kept me entertained during my entire stay. Additional thanks go to the extended Wolfhagen family and the extended Geurts family for letting me be take part in all family activities, from family reunions to Sinterklas and Easter celebrations. It made my stay in Holland very special. Thank you to Andrew Hart for very wise editing help. To be honest, all the elegant sentences in this dissertation are his. I also wish to thank my sisters Allison Spenader and Elizabeth Spenader, whom I forced to do hours of corpus annotation. Thank you also to Elizabeth Spenader for the cover and to Benny Brodda for letting me use his drawings. I am grateful as well for Andreas Heim who has put up with me during these past few years, always patiently supportive, always understanding when I have put my work first. Thank you. And finally, my thanks go to Gunnel Källgren, my first supervisor, who sadly passed away in 1999. Gunnel encouraged me to pursue a Ph.D in computational linguistics at Stockholm University. I only wish very much that she could have been here to see that I did succeed. Jennifer Spenader Stockholm, 23 April, 2002. 1 Introduction Presupposition is a central topic in semantics and pragmatics. Even so, we know much more about presupposition in theory than in practice. The ideas put forward in this work are intended to begin narrowing this gap by examining how presupposed information is used by speakers and understood by hearers in spontaneous spoken discourse.
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