no fun with pronouns

[Ronald Butters]

I don't know why I am so backward about this terminology. You have moved the discussion forward. Thanks, Larry (the postcedent for "you" in the previous sentence).

On Dec 8, 2010, at 1:26 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> In reading Ron's message below, it should be borne in mind that what
> Ron calls "forward anaphora" and "backward anaphora" are
> traditionally called "backward anaphora" and "forward anaphora"
> respectively in the generative literature (and elsewhere, as far as I
> know).  Thus, when some linguists (e.g. Susumu Kuno) have claimed
> that backward anaphora doesn't exist, they're claiming that marked
> structures like "His mother loves John" or "After she came in, Mary
> pulled up a chair" require an earlier antecedent in discourse
> structure, so that "his" or "she" are not "pronominalized" on the
> basis of their identity with the later nominal (John, Mary).  It's
> thus backward anaphora that's harder to process than forward
> anaphora.  (By the way, that claim about the non-existence of true
> backward anaphora is false, as copious corpus research beginning with
> work by Guy Carden has shown.)

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