Bridging inferences in a dynamic, probabilistic frame theory

Data and central issue. It is by now a well-known fact that that the semantic processing of an utterance usually involves different sources of information which are used in parallel to arrive at a coherent interpretation of this utterance in the given context. Three principle sources must be distinguished: (i) the (linguistic) meaning of the lexical items; (ii) (non-linguistic) world and situational knowledge and (iii) the prior linguistic context. A prime example of this interplay between different sources of information are bridging inferences. [AL98, 83p.] take bridging to be an inference that two objects or events that are introduced in a text are related in a particular way that isn’t explicitly stated, and yet the relation is an essential part of the content of the text in the sense that without this information, the lack of connection between the sentences would make the text incoherent. Examples of bridging inferences are given in (1).