Do it anaphora without covert events: In defense of a pro-verb analysis

Abstract

Why can the sentence (1) Mary bathed be followed naturally by (2) Mary did it at home? What does the pronoun in (2) refer to? As Donald Davidson famously noted in “The Logical Form of Action Sentences,” the pronoun seems to refer to an antecedent action or event; yet the first sentence names no such thing. Davidson's answer was that the logical form of sentence (1) does, in fact, contain a “covert” event variable, which serves as the antecedent of “it.” I argue against an event-semantic analysis of do it anaphora using event semantics, defending instead a syntactic approach, according to which do it is simply a pro-verb standing in for the entire verb phrase. A side-by-side comparison of the two theories shows that the pro-verb analysis makes better predictions across a broad range of linguistic phenomena. This finding has, on the one hand, a strictly linguistic significance, offering a better analysis for a ubiquitous expression. Yet it also has some implications for event semantics itself, since the invisibility of covert events to do it anaphora merits an explanation.