Bridging and relevance / Tomoko Matsui.

Originally presented as the author's thesis--University College, London, 1995.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Goals of the Research -- The Problem -- The Theoretical Framework -- A Brief Survey of Past Studies -- Hawkins -- Clark -- Sanford and Garrod -- Sidner -- Characterisation of Bridging Implicature -- Clark's Definition -- An Alternative Definition -- Bridging Reference and Other Types of Referring Expressions -- Relevance Theory -- Two principles of relevance -- Communication and relevance -- Optimal relevance -- Relevance theory and alternative views of communication -- Relevance theory and the code-model -- Relevance theory and Grice -- Utterance Interpretation -- Propositional form -- Implicature -- Bridging reference assignment and accessibility of discourse entities -- Past studies of accessibility factors -- Order of mention -- Syntactic position -- Recency of mention -- Semantics of the main verb -- Parallel function and choice of conjunction -- Manner of mention -- Overall salience -- Topic/focus-based accounts and bridging reference -- Erku and Gundel -- Problems with Erku and Gundel -- Sidner -- Problems with Sidner's pragmatic criterion -- The principle of relevance and bridging reference assignment -- Accessibility of discourse entities and processing effort -- Accessibility of contextual assumptions -- A relevance-theoretic solution to Sidner's problem -- Accessibility of bridging assumptions and other contextual assumptions -- Schemas, Scripts and Frames -- Research on Inference Generation -- The Scenario-based Account -- Scenario and the Domain of Reference -- The Content of the Scenario.

While it has long been taken for granted that context or background information plays a crucial role in reference assignment, there have been very few serious attempts to investigate exactly how they are used. This study provides an answer to the question through an extensive analysis of cases of bridging. The book demonstrates that when encountering a referring expression, the hearer is able to choose a set of contextual assumptions intended by the speaker in a principled way, out of all the assumptions possibly available to him. It claims more specifically that the use of context, as well as.

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