Recent approaches to bridging: Truth, coherence, relevance

This paper considers three recent approaches to bridging reference, based on notions of truth, coherence and relevance, and argues that a relevance-based approach to bridging is preferable on both descriptive and explanatory grounds. Using questionnaire results from Matsui 1995, it compares the predictions of the relevance-theoretic account with several versions of truth-based and coherence-based approaches, and shows how the intuitions behind these approaches might be explained on a relevance-theoretic account.