Anaphora

Final Paper
Winter Term 2006
Northwestern University

Introduction  1

Anaphora as a Linguistic Phenomenon  1

Syntactic and Semantic Approaches to Anaphora  2

Anaphora as a Philosophical Phenomenon  3

Anaphora as a Psycholinguistic Phenomenon  6

Sag and Hankamer’s Approach  9

Sag and Hankamer 1976 ... 9

Sag and Hankamer 1984 ... 10

Compatibility of Sag and Hankamer 1984 with Philosophical Approaches  12

Conclusion  14

Introduction

In this paper I will try to examine how different academic fields approach anaphoric phenomena. The fields involved here are primarily philosophy and linguistics, with its sub-fields of semantics, syntax, and psycholinguistics. Especially in linguistics, Anaphora is tradi-tionally thought of in opposition to deixis. Philosophy is not so much directly concerned with anaphora, but rather more generally with the processes of reference; however this larger dis-cussion adds to an understanding of anaphoric processes too. Formal semantics, again, has developed a new dichotomy of bound anaphora versus referential ones - instead of the classi-cal one between anaphora and deixis. Given these different approaches, I will try to find those within the two broad fields which seem to be best compatible. I will especially present one linguistic approach that might be compatible with at least one strand of the philosophical lit-erature, and also with psycholinguistic insights into the matter. My hope is that Sag & Hank-amer′s paper of 1984 fulfills these criteria and thus allows for an interdisciplinary view of anaphora.

Sag & Hankamer′s approach will however only be addressed later. First, I will give an oversight of what anaphora is supposed to mean linguistically and then go on to present what philosophy makes of the phenomenon.

Anaphora as a Linguistic Phenomenon

Anaphora is part of the phenomenon of indexicality, which also includes deixis. This family of phenomena shares the fact that they cannot be easily accounted for by formal se-mantic theories. This is because they involve reference to a point outside of the linguistic realm of individual sentences, which is usually the basis for a semantic, truth-conditional analysis. Sentences that include indexicals cannot be easily evaluated as to their truth values, because these suddenly depend on extra-linguistic (or at least extra-sentential) features. Be-cause of this problem, indexicality has since long been regarded as the core domain of prag-matics. At the same time it was believed to be a relatively contained problem, which "in-volves a small set of terms and a fairly trivial mapping from the spatio-temporal context of an utterance to a (possibly unique) interpretation for each." (Green 34). This belief is proved wrong as soon as one studies indexicality in more detail. Today it is clear that the problems evoked in this field are neither trivial nor contained. Rather, "the interpretation of indexicals and related anaphora is shown to require assumptions of inferences about the speaker′s beliefs and/or intended referents, and thus requires a broader interpretation of pragmatics." (Green 17).

Anaphora is the linguistic process whereby the speaker uses a relatively vacuous word to refer to an entity that has already been established in previous discourse. This can best be illustrated with an example:

(1) John likes pizza. He rode down to Wholefoods to get some for dinner.
The pronoun he refers to a previously established entity ′John′. In contrast to John, which in-troduces the entity to the discourse, he only reinstates that entity. The mystery of anaphora is not how the entity enters the discourse, i.e. becomes a part of a specific context of utterance (token) from being a mere type (i.e. general word without context-specifics). This is rather a question for deixis. "Deictic reference involves a relation between an object in the world and a linguistic form with no semantically determined reference (some form X is used to refer to A), while anaphoric reference involved relations between such a form and some other linguis-tic expression (the form X is used to refer to something indicated or evoked by some other ex-pression)." (Green 23). Anaphora gives us the problem of what anaphoric expressions like he refer to, the word John or the concept ′John′.

Anaphors can be more or less vacuous. Anaphoric pronouns (he, her), adverbs of time (then, now) and space (there, here), and demonstratives (this, that) are particularly vacuous. Other anaphoric expressions are less so, like epithets (the idiot, where idiot does not refer to a person that is categorically idiotic) and definite descriptions (the gray sweater, to refer to a previously introduced gray sweater). The most vacuous anaphora is ellipsis, where the ana-phoric phenomenon is linked with a void linguistic expression.¹

Syntactic and Semantic Approaches to Anaphora

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1 These examples are taken from Green 25.