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Good intensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

W. C. Watt
W. C. Watt
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine
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Extract

1. There seems still to be some controversy over the matter of whether or not the putative presence in English of obligatory anaphoric references to overtly missing antecedents is of any service in resolving the question of where, if anywhere, these overtly missing antecedents are covertly present.

2. The matter at hand was originally raised by Postal (1969), who asserted that if English permitted anaphors to recover missing antecedents from ‘within’ or ‘beneath’ their sentences' surface antecedents, then the (syntactic) derivations of those sentences had better include somewhere beneath the surface whatever it was that was recovered. Having said this, Postal concluded that English was (with trifling exceptions) unhappily devoid of such anaphoric recovery, since prime examples where such recovery would be required – for example, (1) – were plainly ungrammatical.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 83 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

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