The Syntactic Domain of Anaphora
, T. Reinhart 1976
This thesis deals, primarily, with the structural properties which restrict anaphora options. It is argued that the relation "precede-and-command", which has been believed since early states of transformational grammar to capture these structural restrictions plays, in fact, no role in determining anaphora options.
The discussion introduces the notion "syntactic domain of a node a which is defined as the subtree dominated by the first branching node which dominates a. It is argued that anaphora restrictions apply to two given NPs just in case one of these NPs is in the syntactic domain of the other. If this is the case, the anaphora rule requires that the NP which is in the domain of the other should be a pronoun for an anaphoric relation to hold.
It is suggested, further, that the domains defined this way reflect the basic units of the processing of sentences and, consequently, that major linguistic rules are restricted to operate only within the same syntactic domains, which accounts for various correlations between anaphora options and semantic properties of sentences.
Thesis supervisor: Noam Chomsky
Title: Institute Professor
Introduction 6
Chapter 1 The syntactic domain for coreference of definite NP 8
1.1 The relation of precede and command 8
1.2 The notion "syntactic domain" 9
1.3 The formulation of the restriction on anaphora 13
1.4 The non-relevance of precede-and-command 22
1.5 The c-command domain 31
1.6 Coreference in sentences with extraposed clauses 42
Footnotes 49
Chapter 2 Prepositional phrases (PPs) and preposed constituents 58
2.1 Sentential and V-phrasal PPs 59
2.1.1 Syntactic tests 61
2.1.2 Some semantic differences between sentential and
V-phrasal PPs 64
2.1.3 Coreference facts 68
2.2 Preposed PPs 69
2.2.1 The syntax of preposed PPs 71
2.2.2 Coreference in preposed PPs 75
2.2.3 Some aspects of the semantics of preposed PPs 79
2.2.4 Further coreference mysteries 85
2.3 Topicalization and left dislocation 89
2.4 Summary 93
Footnotes 96
Chapter 3 The restriction on non-definite anaphora 109
3.1 The problem 109
3.2 The non-relevance of "precede" 115
3.3 The restriction in terms of c-command domains 124
Footnotes 142
Chapter 4 Problems and modifications 146
4.1 A modification of c-command 147
4.2 Dialect differences in the case of NP over NP 149
4.3 Domain relations inside the VP 155
4.4 "Island" restrictions on the application of anaphora rules 158
Footnotes 164
Chapter 5 The linguistic significange of the c-command domain 167
5.1 Semantically based accounts of coreference 167
5.1.1 Functional (theme-rheme) approaches 168
5.1.2 Logically based accounts 175
5.2 The minimal domain hypothesis (MDH) 181
5.2.1 The hypothesis 182
5.2.2 Syntactic rules 185
5.2.3 Relative scope 190
5.2.4 Function-argument representations 196
5.2.5 Theme-rheme relations 199
5.3 The psychological reality of c-command domains 200
Footnotes 206