An investigation of definiteness as a trigger of bridging

A bridged interpretation of a noun phrase (NP) is one in which the referent is understood to stand in some unstated relation to an entity or event previously mentioned in the discourse. For example, in the sequence Yasmin approached the house. The door was open., the NP the door is naturally interpreted as referring to a door of the just-mentioned house. In the theoretical literature, definiteness is often identified as the key driver of bridged interpretations, requiring an alternative analysis for bridged indefinites (Yasmin approached the house. A door was open.). We contrast this two-phenomena approach with a one-phenomenon approach, whereby bridging inferences are understood to be the result of general considerations of discourse coherence, particularly facilitated by entity relatedness, but also responsive to effects of definiteness. We present two new methods aimed at measuring the ease and strength of participants’ bridging inferences when entity relatedness and definiteness are manipulated. The two-phenomena view predicts that definiteness has a distinctive role to play in inducing bridged interpretations, but contra this view, our results show no independent effect of definiteness. Rather, Experiment 1 (a dialogue-continuation task that probes the presence of bridged interpretations) shows only a main effect of entity relatedness. In Experiment 2 (a self-paced-reading task that probes processing difficulty when a potential bridge is broken), we find an interaction whereby high entity relatedness and the presence of the definite together induce an early commitment to a bridged interpretation. We take these findings to support a unified account in which definite NPs do not require a separate bridging mechanism, but rather are treated like other NPs in being subject to the joint satisfaction of a set of linguistic and more broadly pragmatic constraints.