Anaphora and semantic interpretation

Tanya Reinhart9780709922377, 0-7099-2237-X

This book has two major goals: the first is a comprehensive analysis of sentence-level anaphora that addresses the questions posed above, and the second is an examination of the broader issue of the relations between the structural properties of sentences and their semantic interpretation within the hypotheses of the autonomy of syntax and of interpretative semantics developed by Chomsky. I argue that the anaphora restrictions themselves obey more general syntactic conditions on all interpretative rules, and, in fact, on all sentence-level linguistic rules. If this is so, these conditions may reflect properties of the processing ability of the mind, and I conclude, in Chapter 10, with the question to what extent we may find correlations between these conditions and the actual processing of sentences.