Constraints on Propositional Anaphora

Anaphors are words whose reference is determined on the basis of the interpretation of some other word or phrase (its antecedent). For example, pronouns are anaphors whose antecedents denote individuals, as in (1).

(1) Nancy has a car. She has owned it for five years.

This talk will focus on anaphors which refer to propositions, as in (2).

(2) Nancy has a car. She told me that.

In particular, this talk will discuss some of the constraints on propositional anaphora, exploring when propositional anaphora is licit (and when it is not).

The first part of the talk deals with pragmatic discourse-level constraints, in particular at-issueness. There are competing notions of at-issueness, but many are discussed in the literature---explicitly or implicitly---as having consequences for a proposition's availability for anaphora in non-trivial ways (e.g., AnderBois et al. 2013). I argue against this tight linking, and demonstrate that a proposition's at-issue status in a discourse (at least as defined by Simons et al. 2010) is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine its availability for anaphora. Thus, propositional anaphora is not constrained by at-issueness, at least under one prominent definition thereof.

The second part of the talk moves from the discourse to the sentence, to see if there are syntactic constraints on propositional anaphora. In the tradition of Karttunen's (1969) examination of which NPs make an individual available for anaphoric reference, I present (highlights from) a comprehensive examination of which structures make propositions available for anaphora. I present some surprising results which cut across traditional syntactic classifications, including data on small clause and raising/control/ECM verb constructions. This data leads me to propose a new generalization for when propositions are available for anaphoric reference. I then compare the observed behavior of propositional anaphora to that of individual anaphora.