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Antecedent Containment: A Dependency Grammar Solution in Terms of Catenae
Author(s) -
Osborne Timothy,
Groß Thomas
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9582.2012.01191.x
Subject(s) - antecedent (behavioral psychology) , containment (computer programming) , dependency (uml) , grammar , linguistics , computer science , psychology , artificial intelligence , philosophy , social psychology , programming language
. The paper presents a new solution to an old problem, the problem of antecedent containment and the infinite regress that it gives rise to. The solution is couched in a dependency grammar (DG) framework and is possible by acknowledging DG catenae . The catena is a novel unit of syntactic analysis. Pronouns that appear to be contained within their antecedents actually take non‐constituent catenae as their antecedents. These catenae quite naturally exclude the pronouns, so that antecedent containment never occurs. This account acknowledges surface configurations only. No appeals are made to derivational mechanisms or abstract representations.