Page 229 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

The term 'anaphora,' as it has come to be used in modern grammatical theory, encompasses the phenomena of pronominal reference and various kinds of ellipsis. What these have in common is that an element or construction is dependent for its interpretation on being associated with something else in the context. Developing an understanding of these phenomena has become an area of intense activity among linguists, although many major questions remain unsolved.
A few examples of different types of anaphora are given in (1). The underlined portions of these examples are anaphoric elements; the italicized expressions are referred to as their 'antecedents.'
which antecedent is chosen for a given anaphoric element, when more than one is syntactically and sem- antically permissible. There has been substantial work on this subject (especially in the computational linguistics literature), but it will not be reviewed here (see Grosz, et al. 1989, and references cited there).
1. Syntax
1.1 Pronominal Anaphora
By far the most widely studied anaphoric elements are third person pronouns (both reflexive and n o n - reflexive) with noun phrase (NP)antecedents.(Tra- ditional grammar holds that the antecedent of a pronoun is a noun; however, it is clear that the ante- cedent is really a noun phrase.) The most basic obser- vations about these elements that any analysis must capture include the following: (a) a reflexive pronoun must have an antecedent nearby; (b) the antecedent of a nonreflexive pronoun cannot be too nearby; and (c) the antecedent of a pronoun cannot be in a position that is subordinate to it. These generalizations are illustrated in (2),using the notation of 'coindexing' (i.e., assigning identical subscripts) to indicate ana- phoric relations. (Thus examples (2c) and (2e) are ungrammatical (only) under the interpretation indi- cated.)
(a) The children, entertained themselves,. (2)
(b) The children, remember that we
entertained themselves,.
(c) The children, entertained them,.
(d) The children, remember that we entertained
them,.
(e) They, remember that we entertained the
children,.
The most influential account of these observations, known as the 'Binding Theory' (henceforth BT), was put forward by Chomsky (1981), building on much earlier work. BT consists of three principles, cor- responding to the three observations made above.
Before presenting them, however, it is necessary to offer some definitions.
(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)
(f) (g) (h)
The children love their parents.
The children love themselves. Thechildrenloveeachother.
The young children love the older ones. Thisdresshasthreelargeholesandthatshirt has two .
Children will break the law if adults do it. Children will break the law if adults do Some people who break the law do so repeatedly.
(1)
There are a variety of issues relating to anaphora that have been extensively investigated. They can be divided roughly into three categories: syntactic, sem- antic, and pragmatic. The central syntactic problem in anaphora is determining what will serve as an ante- cedent for each type of anaphoric element. Subsumed under this general problem are such questions as whether antecedents must be grammatical con- stituents and,if so, of what type; what relative pos- itions in a sentence anaphoric elements and their antecedents may be in; and whether a given choice of antecedent is optional or obligatory. The central semantic issue is how the interpretation of an a n a - phoric element is related to the interpretation of its antecedent. Investigations of this issue have raised many difficult theoretical questions regarding the nat- ure of meaning and semantic representation. The cen- tral pragmatic question is what factors determine
SECTION V Reference
Anaphora
P. Sells and T. Wasow
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