Anaphora: A Reference Guide (review)

Constituting a common issue for linguistics, pragmatics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy, anaphora has been one of the most popular topics of research in the last decade. Mainly based on the government-binding (GB) and/or minimalist theoretical frameworks, the eight papers in this volume constitute an interesting report on the results of current research on this issue.

Ch. 1, ‘Timing puzzles in anaphora and interpretation’, by Andrew Barss, argues in favor of a conception of logical form as the ‘endpoint of the dual syntactic and semantic derivations’ (1). More specifically, a theory of anaphoric and R-expression reconstruction effects is anchored in this model within which the earliness principle applies to all semantic relations.

Ayumi Ueyama’s Ch. 2, ‘Two types of scrambling constructions in Japanese’, focuses on the interplay between anaphora and scrambling (a variation in the linear order of constituents) in Japanese. The analysis results in a bipartite typology of scrambling constructions as either base-generated (when the surface position of the scrambled constituent has binding, crossover, and case A-type properties) or resulting from movement from an underlying complement position.

In Ch. 3, ‘The psycholinguistics of anaphora’, Janet L. Nicol and David A. Swinney present a psycholinguistic model for the real-time processing of anaphoric relations. Syntactic, conceptual-semantic, and pragmatic information is considered, together with aspects of the presentation of the sentence in order to account for the dynamics of ambiguity resolution. The authors give an overview of commonly used methodologies and show that the processing of anaphora in auditory and written contexts varies significantly. Anaphoric interpretation is demonstrated to first imply the development of the set of structurally licensed antecedents for a given proform, before narrowing down to the single best candidate.

Ch. 4, ‘Two pronominal mysteries in the acquisition of binding and control’, by Dana McDaniel, focuses on the acquisition of coreference and control relations in young children from the perspective of the complex bridging of grammatical and discourse requirements. The author explores two ‘mysteries’ (not compatible with universal grammar) in the interpretation and use of pronouns and PRO: ‘principle B lag’, by which children lacking knowledge about emphatic stress seem to allow locally bound pronouns, and a systematically nonadult control rule for control adjuncts.

In Ch. 5, ‘Reference transfers and the Giorgione problem’, Mario Montalbetti analyzes Willard van Orman Quine’s classic puzzle in which a name can simultaneously refer both to its normal referent and to its linguistic form. The author presents a theory that accounts for both this referential puzzle and a wide array of cases of referential transfers by which an NP is used to refer to an object pragmatically associated with its normal referent.

Ch. 6, ‘Tense and anaphora: Is there a tense-specific theory of coreference?’, by Karen Zagona, proposes a new theory of anaphoric relations between tenses. The author reviews the problems related to the notion that the tense system resorts to specific construal rules. An alternative conception is presented, according to which some tense relations obey GB’s condition A. Other phenomena, though often related to tense-interaction issues, are shown to be better understood as hierarchical syntactic relations between mood and aspect.

Hajime Hoji’s Ch. 7, ‘Surface and deep anaphora, sloppy identity, and experiments in syntax’, focuses on the reading of proforms in surface and deep anaphora contexts. The interpretation of sloppy identity, more particularly, is shown to depend on the level at which the relation is formed (the linguistic level for surface anaphora or the nonlinguistic conceptual level for deep anaphora).

Ch. 8, ‘The logic of reflexivity and reciprocity’, by D. Terence Langendoen and Joël Magloire, focuses on the complex relations between the lexicon and anaphoric relations. Basing their approach on the development of a theory of plural antecedents, a theory of plurality of predicates, and a theory of morphological form, the authors account for...