Anaphora Resolved
Floris Roelofsen

Abstract:
Anaphora Resolved
Floris Roelofsen

----------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: This short abstract is intended for specialists in the field.
The preface of the dissertation provides a more gentle introduction,
and each individual chapter comes with a summary which provides somewhat
more detail than can be given here.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The dissertation is about pronominal and verb phrase anaphora in
English.  The first part evaluates, compares, and refines some of the
most prominent theories of pronominal anaphora that have been
developed within the framework of Generative Grammar (Reinhart 1983,
Heim 1998, Fox 1999, Buring 2005, Reinhart 2006).  It is pointed out
that none of these theories alone accounts for all the relevant data
in a satisfactory manner. The theories of Reinhart (2006) and Fox
(1999) are refined, partly drawing on work by Ruys (1994). These
refinements overcome the empirical problems, while keeping the
fundamental assumptions of the original theories intact.

The second part of the dissertation, however, raises some objections
against these assumptions.  Eventually, an alternative theory is
proposed, whose main premise is that anaphora are always contextually
resolved, i.e., their meaning is always contextually determined, and
not sometimes syntactically encoded, as Reinhart and many others
assume. A unified analysis of pronominal and verb phrase anaphora is
presented. A novel account of cascaded ellipsis, of Dahl's puzzle and
of Condition B effects is proposed. The theory is argued to improve on
other recent proposals (cf., Hardt 1999, Elbourne 2005, Schlenker
2005) and is shown to tie in neatly with theories of information
structure and discourse coherence establishment (cf., Rooth 1992,
Schwarzschild 1999, Kehler 2002).