Restricting the Interpretation of Pronouns

Abstract

We will devote the final chapter to a discussion of what types of restrictions on pronoun interpretations we should capture in our grammar, thereby taking up some issues that were left open in the previous chapters. We will first look at the so-called disjoint reference and non-coreference facts. We find that although such facts can be represented syntactically by a contra-indexing procedure, this does not solve the problem of how they can be interpreted. We will then discuss an alternative approach, advanced by T. Reinhart (Reinhart, 1983). According to Reinhart, the only sentence grammar restriction on pronoun interpretation that we need to consider is the condition on what she calls ‘bound anaphora’. Both the disjoint reference and the non-coreference effect, she argues, follow from general pragmatic principles. Interestingly enough, some rather strong support for Reinhart’s line of argumentation comes from the distribution of parasitic gaps, which we discuss in Section 2.2.