Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation

First published in 1983, this book examines anaphora — a central issue in linguistic theory as it lies at the crossroads of several major problems. On the one hand it is believed that the same conditions that govern the interpretation of anaphora also govern syntactic movement rules but on the other, while anaphora is known to interact with various discourse and semantic considerations, it also provides a clear instance of the dependency of the semantic interpretation of sentences upon semantic properties of natural language. This book has two major goals: the first is a comprehensive analysis of sentence-level anaphora that addresses the questions posed above, and the second is an examination of the broader issues of the relations between the structural properties of sentences and their semantic interpretation within the hypotheses of the autonomy of syntax and of interpretative semantics shown by Chomsky.

Preface; 1. Structural Relations and Restrictions; 1.1 Syntactic Domains 1.2 C-Command 1.3 domain Restrictions and Interpretative Rules; 2. Conference of Definite NPs; 2.1 Theoretical Assumptions 2.2 The Non-relevance of ‘Precede-and-Command’ 2.3 The C-Command Rule 2.4 A Comparison Between the C-Command and the Precede-and-Command Rules 2.5 Coreference in Sentences with Extraposed Clauses 2.6 PPs and Indirect Objects 2.7 Coordinate Structures; 3. Prepositional Phrases and Preposed Constituents; 3.1 Sentential and Verb-phrasal Prepositional Phrases 3.2 Preposed PPs 3.3 Topicalisation and Left-dislocation 3.4 Summary; 4. A Survey of Functional Approaches to Definite NP Anaphora; 4.1 Discourse-oriented Approaches 4.2 Relational-grammar Approaches 4.3 Semantic Approaches; 5. Bound Anaphora; 5.1 Quantified Antecedents 5.2 Reflective and Reciprocal Pronounds; 6. The Indexing System of Interpretative Semantics; 6.1 A summary of the Anaphora Conditions 6.2 The Indexing System; 7. The Interpretation of Pronouns: A Restatement of the Anaphora Problems; 7.1 The Problems with the Current Anaphora Picture 7.2 Coreference and Bound Anaphora 7.3 The Coindexing Procedure and the Interpretation of Coindexing 7.4 Coreference 7.5 Summary; 8. Unsolved Problems of Anaphora; 8.1 PP Problems 8.2 Possessive NPs 8.3 ‘Experiencing’ Verbs; 9. Other Interpretative Rules; 9.1 Function-argument Representations 9.2 Relative Scope of Quantifiers 9.3 Theme-rheme Relations; 10. The Psychological Reality of the C-Command Conditions; 10.1 Syntactic Rules 10.2 Processing Strategies; References; Index