Opacity, Coreference, and Pronouns

Abstract

The problem discussed here is to find a basis for a uniform treatment of the relation between pronouns and their antecedents, taking into account both linguists’ and philosophers’ approaches. The two main candidates would appear to be the linguists’ notion of coreference and the philosophers’ notion of pronouns as variables. The notion of coreference can be extended to many but not all cases where the antecedent is non-referential. The pronouns-as-variables approach appears to come closer to full generality, but there are some examples of ‘pronouns of laziness’ which appear to resist either of the two approaches.

Earlier versions of this paper, under various titles, were presented orally to the Claremont Philosophical Discussion Group, the UCLA Linguistics Colloquium, the IBM Watson Research Center, the IBM Systems Development Division at Endicott, and at Princeton University. Criticisms and suggestions received on these occasions have helped lead to many revisions and additions. I am particularly grateful for the sympathetic encouragement given me by philosophers such as David Kaplan, Jack Vickers, and Gilbert Harman in this attempt to communicate simultaneously with linguists and philosophers

The most important sources for the present work are the following: among linguists, Postal (1968), for bringing the notion of coreference to prominence; Bach (1969, 1970), for first pointing out some fundamental problems with the treatment of pronominalization as a substitution process; McCawley [1970, 1968], for his attempts to show logical notation, including the use of variables, to be of linguistic relevance; and Karttunen (1968a, b, 1969a, b), who has been exploring many of the same problems as are discussed here, and from whom a number of the examples below are taken or adapted (some of which are originally due to Baker (1966)). Among philosophers, the main sources are Quine (1960), for the notion of opacity and its relation to reference; Donnellan (1966), for claiming a referential/attributive distinction in definite noun phrases even in transparent contexts; and Geach (1962) for distinguishing ‘pronouns of laziness’ from pronouns used like variables.