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Semantic atoms of anaphora

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Abstract

It is argued that most anaphors have semantic content and that the semantic content of a given anaphoric atom plays an active role in determining both its distribution and the interpretation of the sentences in which it is employed. It is first demonstrated that semantic distinctions between semantically relational anaphoric atoms predict differences between their distributions. It is then argued that all of the semantically relational anaphoric atoms respect Principle A, while semantically contentless anaphors often do not.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, 18 Seminary Place, 08903, New Brunswick, NJ

    Ken Safir

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I would like to thank a number of people who have provided native speaker judgments, including Viviane Déprez, Marta Suarez, Vieri Samek-Lodovici, Eric Bakovic, Maria Bittner, Angelika Kratzer, Teun Hoekstra, Peter Coopmans, Toril Fiva, Tarald Taraldsen, Pierre Pica, Roli Lall, Yael Sharvit, Martin Everaert, and Masaaki Fuji. For commenting on earlier drafts, I would like to thank Derek Bickerton, Anne Zribi-Hertz, Friederike Moltmann, Richard Sproat, Martin Everaert, Liliana Sanchez, Alec Marantz, and three diligent NLLT reviewers. Finally, I would like to thank audiences at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, University of Tromsø, and University of California Santa Cruz, and the participants in my Spring 1994 seminar on anaphora at Rutgers University.

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Safir, K. Semantic atoms of anaphora. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 14, 545–589 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133598

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