Anaphora and negation
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Anaphora and negation Karen S. Lewis1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract One of the central questions of discourse dynamics is when an anaphoric pronoun is licensed. This paper addresses this question as it pertains to the complex data involving anaphora and negation. It is commonly held that negation blocks anaphoric potential, for example, we cannot say “Bill doesn’t have a car. It is black”. However, there are many exceptions to this generalization. This paper examines a variety of types of discourses in which anaphora on indefinites under the scope of negation is felicitous. These cases are not just of intrinsic interest, but I argue present serious problems for the dynamic semantic framework, which builds the licensing facts in to the semantics. I argue in favor of adopting a dynamic pragmatics, a theory that explains context change through general Gricean principles, and combining it with a static, d-type theory of anaphora, in which pronouns go proxy for definite descriptions. Keywords Anaphora · Negation · Dynamic semantics · Dynamic pragmatics · Descriptions · Pronouns · Discourse
1 Introduction The task of an account of discourse dynamics is to explain how information flows through a discourse, that is, how the context is affected by content and how content is affected by context. One specific area of interest is pronouns that are anaphoric on indefinite descriptions, as in (1): (1) a. A woman walked in. b. She sat down. ‘She’ in some sense co-refers with ‘a woman’, but since the indefinite ‘a woman’ is not a referring term, we cannot simply say that they refer to the same thing. Nor can
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Karen S. Lewis [email protected] Department of Philosophy, Barnard College, Columbia University, Milbank Hall, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA
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K. S. Lewis
we say that ‘a woman’ syntactically binds the pronoun, since it is beyond its syntactic scope. This gives rise to two questions: 1) what sort of semantic value do pronouns like ‘she’ get? (call this the semantic question) and 2) when are pronouns like ‘she’ acceptable? (call this the licensing question). Unlike referring terms, indefinites do not always allow for anaphoric reference with subsequent pronouns. For example, it is uncontroversial that in general, indefinite descriptions in ordinary, simple, affirmative sentences like (2a) license anaphoric pronouns, whereas those under the scope of negation, as in (3a) do not: (2)
a.
Bill has a car.
(3)
b. a.
It is black. Bill doesn’t have a car.
b.
#It is black.1
Such data has motivated many theorists to think of semantics dynamically, taking discourse and context change as central.2 In a dynamic semantics, context change potential (CCP) rather than truth conditions is the basic semantic notion. Contexts are information states. They keep track of the state of the discourse at any given point: what information has been accepted, what objects or questions are under discussion, etc. In dynamic semantics, indefinites introduce novel discourse referents into the context. Discourse referents ar
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