Perspectives on nominal bridging

Mandy Simons, CMU

Abstract

Nominal bridging is illustrated in the sequence in (1), where the subject NP of the second sentence is naturally understood as the or a door of the just-mentioned house, even though this relation is not made explicit:

(1) Jane approached the house. A door/The door was open.
Such bridging is ubiquitous in conversation, and extends also to bridges involving events and states of affairs.

In this talk I will report on two related lines of ongoing research on the topic of nominal bridging. One line of work, joint with Hannah Rohde (Edinburgh), is an experimental investigation of factors contributing to bridging; currently, the work focuses specifically on the relative contributions of definiteness and world knowledge to the likelihood of an interpreter drawing a bridging inference. The second line of work, joint with David Danks (UCSD), adopts a cognitive perspective on bridging, and offers a model of the contribution of world knowledge to bridging in terms of spreading activation over concept representations. I will present the current state of play of these two projects, and will then identify some broader theoretical and methodological questions raised by the work.