Anaphora in Generative Grammar

Anaphora in Generative Grammar
Author: Thomas Wasow
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 193
Release: 1979-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027271275

Intuitively, it is clear why languages have anaphoric relations: anaphora reduces redundancy, thereby shortening (and hence simplifying) sentences. In order for this simplification to be possible, however, it is necessary that the speaker of a language be able to identify correctly the elements participating in an anaphoric relation and to determine correctly the meaning of the anaphor on the basis of meaning of the antecedent. If a grammar is to reflect the linguistic competence of a native speaker of a language, it must include mechanisms of associating anaphor and antecedent. In this volume the following questions will be considered: What sorts of mechanisms are best suited for representing anaphora in a grammar? What are the conditions on the rule(s) associating anaphors with antecedents? Do the various cases of anaphora form a linguistically significant class of phenomena, and, if so, how can the grammar capture this fact? And what do these answers entail for linguistic theory?

A Grammar of Anaphora

A Grammar of Anaphora
Author: Joseph Aoun
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
Total Pages: 190
Release: 1985-01-01
Genre: Anaphora (Linguistics)
ISBN: 9780262010757

The study of anaphoric expressions -- especially reflexives and reciprocals -- has played an increasingly important role in linguistic theory. Within the Extended Standard Theory, the central notions of government and binding have depended crucially on the proper understanding of anaphoric relations. A Grammar of Anaphora offers the most comprehensive and significant treatment of such phenomena currently available. Its theoretical and empirical investigation of the notions of anaphora and of binding in syntax should define the direction of research in this field for the next decade. In Chomsky's Government-Binding (G-B) framework the relationship between an anaphoric expression and its antecedent is constrained by certain binding principles. This book argues that another kind of anaphoric relation exists, beyond those defined by Chomsky's framework. Its generalization of binding extends the theory so that it can solve various conceptual and empirical problems that it originally raised, and provides a unified explanation of seemingly unrelated phenomena in a host of constructions and languages. The book is also able to dispense with the Empty Category Principle which has been a major focus within G-B theory. It proposes instead a structural unification of the notions of pronouns, empty categories, and anaphors which leads to new insights in areas never treated in a coherent way before.

Anaphora and Type Logical Grammar

Anaphora and Type Logical Grammar
Author: Gerhard Jäger
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2005-12-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1402039050

Type Logical Grammar is a framework that emerged from the synthesis of two traditions: Categorial Grammar from formal linguistics and substructural logics from logic. Grammatical composition is conceived as resource conscious logical deduction. Such a grammar is necessarily surface oriented and lexicalistic. The Curry-Howard correspondence supplies an elegant compositional mapping from syntax to semantics. Anaphora does not seem to fit well into this framework. In type logical deductions, each resource is used exactly once. Anaphora, however, is a phenomenon where semantic resources are used more than once. Generally admitting the multiple use of lexical resources is not possible because it would lead to empirical inadequacy and computational intractability. This book develops a hybrid architecture that allows to incorporate anaphora resolution into grammatical deduction while avoiding these consequences. To this end, the grammar logic is enriched with a connective that specifically deals with anaphora. After giving a self-contained introduction into Type Logical Grammar in general, the book discusses the formal properties of this connective. In the sequel, Jäger applies this machinery to numerous linguistic phenomena pertaining to the interaction of pronominal anaphora, VP ellipsis and quantification. In the final chapter, the framework is extended to indefiniteness, specificity and sluicing.

Anaphora in Celtic and Universal Grammar

Anaphora in Celtic and Universal Grammar
Author: R. Hendrick
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 302
Release: 1988-10-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781556080661

This book is based in large part on fieldwork that I conducted in Brittany and Wales in 1983 and 1985. I am thankful for a Fulbright Award for Research in Western Europe and a Faculty Development Award from the University of North Carolina that funded that fieldwork. lowe a less tangible, but no less real, debt to Steve Anderson, G. M. Awbery, Steve Harlow and Jim McCloskey whose work initially sparked my interest, and led me to undertake this project. I want to thank Joe Emonds and Alec Marantz who read portions of Chapter 3 and 5. I am particularly grateful though to Kathleen Flanagan, Frank Heny and two anonymous referees who read a dyslexic and schizophrenic manuscript, providing me with criticisms that improved this final version considerably. The Welsh nationalist community in Aberstwyth and its Breton coun terpart in Quimper helped make the time I spent in Wales and Brittany productive. I am indebted to Thomas Davies, Partick Favreau, Lukian Kergoat, Sue Rhys, John Williams and Beatrice among others for sharing their knowledge of their languages with me. Catrin Davies and Martial Menard were especially patient and helpful. Without their assistance this work would have been infinitely poorer. I am hopeful that this book will help stimulate more interest in the Celtic languages and culture, and assist, even in a small way, those in Wales and Brittany who struggle to keep their language and culture strong.

The Syntax of Anaphora

The Syntax of Anaphora
Author: Ken Safir
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2004-04-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019803718X

In this work, Ken Safir develops a comprehensive theory on the role of anaphora in syntax. First, he contends that the complementary distribution of forms that support the anaphoric readings is not accidental, contrary to most current thinking, but rather should be derived from a principle, one that he proposes in the form of an algorithm. Secondly, he maintains that dependent identity relations are always possible where they are not prohibited by a constraint. Lastly, he proposes that there are no parameters of anaphora - that all anaphora-specific principles are universal, and that the patterns of anaphora across languages arise entirely from a restricted set of lexical properties. This comprehensive consideration of anaphora redirects current thinking on the subject.

Dynamics of Meaning

Dynamics of Meaning
Author: Gennaro Chierchia
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2009-02-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0226104516

In The Dynamics of Meaning, Gennaro Chierchia tackles central issues in dynamic semantics and extends the general framework. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of dynamic semantics and discusses in detail the phenomena that have been used to motivate it, such as "donkey" sentences and adverbs of quantification. The second chapter explores in greater depth the interpretation of indefinites and issues related to presuppositions of uniqueness and the "E-type strategy." In Chapter 3, Chierchia extends the dynamic approach to the domain of syntactic theory, considering a range of empirical problems that includes backwards anaphora, reconstruction effects, and weak crossover. The final chapter develops the formal system of dynamic semantics to deal with central issues of definites and presupposition. Chierchia shows that an approach based on a principled enrichment of the mechanisms dealing with meaning is to be preferred on empirical grounds over approaches that depend on an enrichment of the syntactic apparatus. Dynamics of Meaning illustrates how seemingly abstract stances on the nature of meaning can have significant and far-reaching linguistic consequences, leading to the detection of new facts and influencing our understanding of the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface.

Anaphora and Language Design

Anaphora and Language Design
Author: Eric J. Reuland
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Anaphora (Linguistics).
ISBN: 9780262015059

Pronouns and anaphors (including reflexives such as himself and herself) may or must depend on antecedents for their interpretation. These dependencies are subject to conditions that prima facie show substantial crosslinguistic variation. In this monograph, Eric Reuland presents a theory of how these anaphoric dependencies are represented in natural language in a way that does justice to the the variation one finds across languages. He explains the conditions on these dependencies in terms of elementary properties of the computational system of natural language. He shows that the encoding of anaphoric dependencies makes use of components of the language system that all reflect different cognitive capacities; thus the empirical research he reports on offers insights into the design of the language system. Reuland's account reduces the conditions on binding to independent properties of the grammar, none of which is specific to binding. He offers a principled account of the roles of the lexicon, syntax, semantics, and the discourse component in the encoding of anaphoric dependencies; a window into the overall organization of the grammar and the roles of linguistic and extralinguistic factors; a new typology of anaphoric expressions; a view of crosslinguistic variation (examining facts in a range of languages, from English, Dutch, Frisian, German, and Scandinavian languages to Fijian, Georgian, and Malayalam) that shows unity in diversity.

A Reference Grammar of Chinese

A Reference Grammar of Chinese
Author: Chu-Ren Huang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2016-03-31
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1316395251

A Reference Grammar of Chinese is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to the linguistic structure of Chinese, covering all of the important linguistic features of the language and incorporating insights gained from research in Chinese linguistics over the past thirty years. With contributions from twenty-two leading Chinese linguists, this authoritative guide uses large-scale corpora to provide authentic examples based on actual language use. The accompanying online example databases ensure that a wide range of exemplars are readily available and also allow for new usages to be updated. This design offers a new paradigm for a reference grammar where generalizations can be cross-checked with additional examples and also provide resources for both linguistic studies and language learning. Featuring bilingual term lists, this reference grammar helps readers to access relevant literature in both English and Chinese and is an invaluable reference for learners, teachers and researchers in Chinese linguistics and language processing.

Studies in Anaphora

Studies in Anaphora
Author: Barbara A. Fox
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 530
Release: 1996
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027229279

The last 15 years has seen an explosion of research on the topic of anaphora. Studies of anaphora have been important to our understanding of cognitive processes, the relationships between social interaction and grammar, and of directionality in diachronic change. The contributions to this volume represent the “next generation” of studies in anaphora — defined broadly as those morpho-syntactic forms available to speakers for formulating reference — taking as their starting point the foundation of research done in the 1980s. These studies examine in detail, and with a richness of methods and theories, what patterns of anaphoric usage can reveal to us about cognition, social interaction, and language change.