Missing Antecedents Found

Philip Miller,Gabriel Flambard,Pascal Amsili,Barbara Hemforth

doi:10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4795

Abstract

Numerous papers have used so-called `missing antecedent phenomena' as a criterion for distinguishing deep and surface anaphora. Specifically, only the latter are claimed to licence pronouns with missing antecedents. These papers also argue that missing antecedent phenomena provide evidence that surface anaphora involve unpronounced syntactic structure in the ellipsis site. The present paper suggests that the acceptability judgments on which the argument is based exhibit a confound because they do not take discourse conditions on VPE (a surface anaphor) and VPA (a deep anaphor) into account. Two acceptability experiments provide evidence that what is relevant to the judgments are the discourse conditions and not the presence of deep vs. surface anaphors, casting doubt on the reliability of missing antecedent phenomena as a criterion for deep vs. surface status.

Highlights

Numerous papers have used so-called ‘missing antecedent phenomena’ as a criterion for distinguishing deep and surface anaphora
While the experiment was sensitive to subtle differential effects of the presence of adjuncts for Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and Verb Phrase Anaphors (VPA), no main effect was found for the choice between VPE and VPA, contrary to classical expectations
Beyond the fact that Experiment 2 provides no evidence for a distinction between VPE and VPA in terms of their capacity to make missing antecedents available, one might argue that it provides some evidence against the idea of the presence of unpronounced syntactic structure in the ellipsis site

Summary

Introduction

Numerous papers have used so-called ‘missing antecedent phenomena’ as a criterion for distinguishing deep and surface anaphora. On the other hand, are argued to be present as such in underlying representation and are linked to their antecedent through interpretative means They propose that Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), illustrated in (2-a) is an instance of a surface anaphor whereas Verb Phrase Anaphors (VPA) like do it, do this and do that, illustrated in (2-b), are cases of deep anaphors. Their reasoning for (3) follows that of G&P for (1): (3-b) is grammatical because the NP a camel is present in deep structure, making it entirely comparable with (3-a). (4) is ungrammatical because the VPA did it, a deep anaphor, is present as such at all levels of syntax, so that there is no occurrence of Big Sam cut Sonny Black with a knife and no antecedent available for it

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