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.

Anaphora and Language Design (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs) PDF

The list of books you might like