Surface Anaphora Research Articles

On null arguments and phi-features in second language acquisition

AbstractSaito, Mamoru. 2007. Notes on East Asian argument ellipsis.Language Research43. 203–227 argues thatargument ellipsis(AE) is available only in languages that lack phi-feature agreement. Accordingly, Japanese, but not English, permits AE. Under Saito’s theoretical framework, this paper compares experimental data from L1 Japanese learners of L2 English (J-EFL) and L1 English learners of L2 Japanese (E-JFL). Given that sloppy and quantificational reading arises from an ellipsis operation (Hankamer, Jorge & Sag, Ivan. 1976. Deep and surface anaphora.Linguistic Inquiry7. 391–426, Takahashi, Daiko. 2008. Noun phrase ellipsis. In Miyagawa, Shigeru & Saito, Mamoru (eds.),The Oxford handbook of Japanese linguistics, 394–422. Oxford: Oxford University Press, among others), we hypothesize that J-EFL learners, but not E-JFL learners, allow the reading in point with null arguments: AE is available only in the grammar of J-EFL learners, forced by the lack of phi-features in their L2 English grammar, due to L1 transfer. The results from our main study adopting a truth value judgement task supported the hypothesis. Based on our finding, we suggest that correct L2 phi-feature specification can ultimately be obtained when no phi-features are present in L1 (Ishino, Nao. 2012.Feature transfer and feature learning in universal grammar: A comparative study of the syntactic mechanism for second language acquisition. Doctoral dissertation: Kwansei Gakuin University, Miyamoto, Yoichi. 2012.Dainigengo-ni okeru hikenzaiteki-na yōso-ni kansuru Ichikōsatsu[A study on null elements in second language acquisition]. Paper presented at the 84th ELSJ annual general meeting: Senshu University, 26 May).

Missing Antecedents Found

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.

Contrasting Contrastive Left-Dislocation Explications

Abstract Of the three logically possible approaches to contrastive left-dislocation (CLD) (base-generation cum deep anaphora; movement cum surface anaphora; elliptical clausal juxtaposition cum resumption), two are represented prominently in the recent literature. Ott’s (2014) account treats CLD uniformly in terms of clausal juxtaposition, the first clause being stripped down to its contrastive topic via an ellipsis operation said to be akin to sluicing. He argues that this analysis is superior to Grohmann’s (2003) approach, featuring movement within a single prolific domain and late spell-out of a resumptive element. Using data mainly from Hungarian and Dutch, we reveal problems for Ott’s biclausal account that undermine its apparent conceptual appeal and compromise its descriptive accuracy. We show that the ellipsis operation required is sui generis, that the approach fails to assimilate the crosslinguistic variation attested in the availability of multiple CLD to known cases of parametric variation in the left periphery, and that it undergenerates in several empirical domains, including P-stranding and “floated” arguments. Grohmann’s movement-cum-surface-anaphora analysis as it stands also cannot handle all these data, but it can be fixed to fit the facts. For Ott’s analysis, no patches seem available. Some further empirical properties of CLD appear underivable from either of these approaches. For these, the base-generation-cum-deep-anaphora analysis can be considered.

On "deep and surface anaphora"

Resumo: Hankamer and Sag (1976) argue for a distinction between deep and surface anaphora. Their conclusions were challenged by Williams (1977) who presents arguments against this distinction.

On the Nature of Null Clausal Complements in Japanese

AbstractThis paper argues that the null clausal complement in Japanese is not derived via CP ellipsis but is rather an instance of pro. The availability of sloppy interpretation in the construction under investigation apparently argues that ellipsis is involved there, but it is revealed under close scrutiny of the sloppy interpretation in question that the null clausal complement behaves like deep anaphora, not like surface anaphora.

On the Understood Object in English

In English, there are many verbs that are transitive by nature but are sometimes used without an object. These have been called object-omission verbs. This paper classifies them into two types: indefinite object-omission verbs (e.g., eat, read, write, etc.) and definite object-omission verbs (e.g., know, shake, understand, etc.). Hankamer and Sag (1976) divide anaphora into two types, depending on the availability of linguistic or situational contexts: deep anaphora and surface anaphora. This paper proposes that the understood objects of object-omission verbs induce two different types of anaphora, corresponding to two types of object-omission verbs: inherent anaphora and contextual anaphora. We further propose that inherent anaphora is lexical, while contextual anaphora is either deep- or surface-anaphoric in the sense of Hankamer and Sag.

Fragments vs. null arguments in Korean

Korean has two types of answers shorter than full sentential answers: Fragments and null argument constructions. Apparently the two constructions have the same interpretative processes. However, there are some cases where the fragment and null argument construction behave differently: e.g., wh-puzzles, sloppy interpretation. We suggest that the two constructions involve two different types of anaphora and that the sources of sloppy(-like) interpretation are fundamentally distinct. Fragments pattern differently with null arguments in that only the former may display genuine sloppy readings. The latter may yield sloppy-like readings which are pragmatically induced by the explicature that can be cancelled unlike genuine sloppy readings in fragments. Evidence (wh-ellipsis, quantifier ellipsis) all lends substantial support to our claim that fragments are analyzed as an instance of clausal ellipsis while null arguments are analyzed as an instance of null pronoun pro; hence, the former is surface anaphora whereas the latter is deep anaphora in the sense of Hankamer & Sag (1976).

The Bound‐Variable Interpretation in Child Japanese: The Implicit Variable, the Anaphor Zibun, and Stripping Structures with Case Markers

Abstract. This paper examines how Japanese‐speaking children interpret implicit variables and the anaphor zibun‘self’ when both are concerned with referential and quantificational subjects and antecedents in conjoined stripping structures with a case marker. In previous studies on the availability of sloppy readings in child Japanese, it has been unclear whether the attested sloppy reading really stems from LF copying of linguistic antecedents. Those studies employed null object and soo‐su‘do so’ constructions; however, there is debate about whether these constructions are instances of surface or deep anaphora.To show whether Japanese‐speaking children have unambiguous accessibility to bound‐variable or sloppy interpretations in the grammar of Japanese, I did three experiments using a stripping construction with a case marker, which is considered to involve LF copying of linguistic antecedents (Fukaya & Hoji 1999). It has been shown that Japanese‐speaking children are able to associate implicit variables and zibun as a bound variable with referential and quantificational antecedents and that sloppy readings are available in child Japanese. This study provides evidence that, in both child and adult grammars, the Japanese stripping construction with a case marker involves LF copying of an antecedent IP and is therefore an instance of surface anaphora.

Some Norwegian “Type Anaphora” are Surface Anaphora

The Norwegian pronoundet‘it, that’ is basically third person neuter singular. Under certain conditions, it can have antecedents that are not neuter singular (for example,Marit kjøpte en kylling—Detkjøpte John også‘Marit bought a chicken.masc—John bought one too’). Used this way, the pronoun does not refer to the same object as its antecedent; Borthen 2003 refers to it as a “type anaphor.” This article argues that type anaphora are not a unitary phenomenon. There are two groups with very different properties. One group realizes what was called surface anaphora in Hankamer & Sag 1976. The other group has a generic or eventive interpretation.*

Do So is Shallow

This paper explores do so as a case of VP anaphora. According to Hankamer and Sags (1976) seminal work, do so is classified as a surface anaphor. After examining several tests of anaphora, I first show that do so is on the borderline of Hankamer and Sags dichotomy of deep vs. surface anaphora. As a consequence, I propose that shallow anaphora exists between deep and surface anaphora and that do so is such a case. The paper also explores Postals (1969) outbound anaphora of do so vs. do it out of anaphoric islands. I argue that outbound anaphora is influenced by the mood, tense, and aspect values associated with the host verb do.

Truncated Clefts are Ambiguous

This paper explores the so-called truncated cleft in English. This construction has been classified as a type of copular clauses since Higgins’s (1973) taxonomy of copular clauses. Along the line of Hedberg (2000) and Birner et al. (2007), I observe that truncated clefts are transformationally ambiguous between the copular reading and the cleft reading. I argue that a sufficiently salient open proposition is a crucial factor of disambiguating these two readings. The presence of a salient open proposition engenders the cleft reading of truncated clefts in linguistic contexts, whereas the copular reading is available in situational contexts. Hence, truncated clefts are placed between deep anaphora and surface anaphora in the sense of Hankamer and Sag (1976).

NATIVE SPEAKERS’ VERSUS L2 LEARNERS’ SENSITIVITY TO PARALLELISM IN VP-ELLIPSIS

This article examines sensitivity to structural parallelism in verb phrase ellipsis constructions in English native speakers as well as in three groups of advanced second language (L2) learners. The results of a set of experiments, based on those of Tanenhaus and Carlson (1990), reveal subtle but reliable differences among the various learner groups. These differences are interpreted as showing that some L2 learners can acquire sensitivity to parallelism in the absence of surface transfer. Furthermore, the results cast doubt on two conventional theoretical claims: that the parallelism effect has a syntactic basis and that it is uniquely linked to instances of surface anaphora (Hankamer & Sag, 1976).

Anaphora: A Reference Guide (review)

Reviewed by: Anaphora: A reference guide ed. by Andrew Barss Cyril Auran Anaphora: A reference guide. Ed. by Andrew Barss. (Explaining linguistics.) Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. 288. ISBN 0631211187. $40.95. 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, [End Page 188] 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...

Antecedent reactivation by surface and deep anaphora in Norwegian

Anaphora are expressions in language that depend on other linguistic entities for their full meaning. They can furthermore be divided into two types according to the level of representation where they find their antecedents: Surface anaphora, which resolve their reference at the sentence representation level, and deep anaphora, which resolve their reference at the non-grammatical level of discourse representation. The linguistic theory of these two anaphor types, and recent findings about processing differences at these two levels, combine to predict that surface anaphora should show fast and immediate reactivation of their antecedents, whereas deep anaphora should have a slower time course of antecedent re-access. These predictions were confirmed with two lexical decision task experiments with Norwegian stimuli.

Getting There (Slowly)

The general foundations for a theory of human sentence processing and the basic goals and questions of the 1960s are argued to be solid and still very relevant today, even if the particular processing model of the time (the clausal model) does not hold up. Today there is considerable agreement that sentence processing is both fast and grammatically controlled from the outset, and that minimal structure and recent attachments are favored across a diverse range of languages. Parsing is not purely bottom-up but instead allows phrases to be postulated before all daughters have been parsed; it works similarly for head-initial and head-final languages. The parser takes as input a rich prosodic/intonational representation which influences processing in ways that extend far beyond use of intonational boundaries as local (juncture) cues. It is argued that psycholinguistic evidence disconfirms the use of prepackaged fully articulated X′ templates for identifying phrase structure, instead supporting the extended projections of Grimshaw (1991). Further, considerable evidence shows that the processor respects grammatical distinctions among types of dependencies, as indicated by differential processing effects for antecedent-government chains versus binding relations, by the processing difficulty of composite dependencies involving more than one grammatical type of dependency, and by distinctions between deep and surface anaphora. The central problem for future theories of sentence processing is claimed to be the development of theories of sentence interpretation. Various possible approaches are discussed, including parallel computation of alternatives with subsequent selection, a task-driven interpretive system, and underspecification. The question is raised whether sentence-level psycholinguistics is in the middle of a paradigm shift from models with symbolic representations and an intrinsically serial (Von Neumann) architecture to constraint-satisfaction/connectionist models with inherently parallel architectures. Reasons are offered for rejecting current constraint-satisfaction models, including lack of supporting evidence discriminating between constraint-satisfaction and “conventional” models, serious problems with the use of prepackaged X′ templates for identifying phrase structure (the only proposal to date for handling syntactic structures in constraint-based models) and an inability to deal with cross-language generalizations. Pure connectionist models are unlikely to fare better in the future for two reasons. They are apparently unable to handle restricted universal quantification (Marcus, 1998)which clearly lies within the capacity of the human sentence processor. Further, competition between alternatives lies at the very heart of such models. Maximal competition should occur in processing fully ambiguous sentences and thus they are predicted to take longer to process than biased or temporarily ambiguous ones (Frazier & Clifton, 1997). But the empirical evidence suggests that fully ambiguous sentences are not systematically harder to process than their disambiguated counterparts.

Comparative Ellipsis and logical form

This paper is a study of the syntactic process of Comparative Ellipsis (CE) and its semantic interpretation. Concentrating on CE constructions in Modern Hebrew containing the morphemeaSer, the paper argues for an analysis of these constructions as sentential structures undergoing ellipsis, rather than base-generated PPs that are assigned sentential meaning by semantic interpretation. The paper argues that CE differs from other rules of ellipsis in comparatives on the basis of a distinction between deep and surface anaphora. Following work by Sag (1976) and Pesetsky (1982) on gapping, the paper claims that CE involves LF copying of IP, from the main clause into the comparative clause which is base-generated as a reduced CP. This analysis accounts for various properties of CE, in particular the fact that it cannot occur in comparative clauses containingma ‘what’. The paper presents both syntactic and semantic arguments in favor of a clausal analysis of CE constructions withaSer and against an analysis of direct semantic interpretation.

Psychological explanations of deep and surface anaphora

A distinction has been made between two classes of anaphora. One class can take as antecedents not only linguistic constituents, but also objects and events in the extra-linguistic context. The other class accepts only certain linguistic elements as antecedents. It is not well understood why there should be two such classes, nor why a given form of anaphora is in one class rather than the other. This article attempts to explain the existence of the two classes by analyzing the difficulty a listener would have in recovering the antecedents of various forms of anaphora. This analysis suggests that it is intrinsically more difficult to discover the antecedents of some forms than of others, and that it is just these forms (with one exception) that have restrictions on acceptable antecedents. Therefore, the grammatical distinction between these two classes is not arbitrary, but subserves an important communicative function - that of ensuring that antecedents for anaphors are always recoverable.

Surface form and memory in question answering

Speakers tend to repeat materials from previous talk. This tendency is experimentally established and manipulated in various question-answering situations. It is shown that a question's surface form can affect the format of the answer given, even if this form has little semantic or conversational consequence, as in the pair Q: (At) what time do you close. A: “ (At)five o'clock.” Answerers tend to match the utterance to the prepositional (nonprepositional) form of the question. This “correspondence effect” may diminish or disappear when, following the question, additional verbal material is presented to the answerer. The experiments show that neither the articulatory buffer nor long-term memory is normally involved in this retention of recent speech. Retaining recent speech in working memory may fulfill a variety of functions for speaker and listener, among them the correct production and interpretation of surface anaphora. Reusing recent materials may, moreover, be more economical than regenerating speech anew from a semantic base, and thus contribute to fluency. But the realization of this strategy requires a production system in which linguistic formulation can take place relatively independent of, and parallel to, conceptual planning.