Open AccessMissing Antecedents Found
Author(s) -
Philip Miller,
Barbara Hemforth,
Pascal Amsili,
Gabriel Flambard
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
proceedings of the linguistic society of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2473-8689
DOI - 10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4795
Subject(s) - antecedent (behavioral psychology) , anaphora (linguistics) , ellipsis (linguistics) , argument (complex analysis) , linguistics , missing data , computer science , natural language processing , psychology , artificial intelligence , resolution (logic) , philosophy , social psychology , biochemistry , chemistry , machine learning
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.