Program | Crash-course | Registration | Submission of papers | Contact | Important Dates | Abstracts
Before the Colloquium, Prof. Craige Roberts will give a three day crash-course “Anaphora in Discourse”, from September 18th to 20th, 2017.
This course will introduce students to the basics of anaphora in natural language discourse, i.e. the use and interpretation of anaphoric elements like pronouns and definite descriptions. We will consider constraints on occurrence in discourse and interpretation which characterize anaphora across languages, focusing on data from English and Brazilian Portuguese, with appeal to relevant phenomena from other languages. Among the topics to be addressed are:
- bound vs. non-bound anaphora, and the phenomenon of strict vs. Sloppy interpretation
- intra- and inter-sentential anaphora
- donkey anaphora and discourse referents
- definiteness: uniqueness vs. familiarity theories, applied to a range of anaphoric triggers: pronouns, definite descriptions, demonstratives constraints on anaphora resolution, including: logical constraints; Right Frontier and other coherence-based constraints; salience and the Question Under Discussion.
Recommended to read, in this order:
**Büring (2008)
General References:
Büring, Daniel (2005) Binding Theory. Cambridge University Press
Reinhart, Tanya (1983) Coreference and bound anaphora: A restatement of the anaphora questions. Linguistics and Philosophy6:47-88
Heim, Irene (1982) The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases. Garland Publishing , NY, Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics Series. Read Chapter 1.
Roberts, Craige (1989) Modal Subordination and Pronominal Anaphora in Discourse. Linguistics and Philosophy 12.6:683-721. Reprinted in Javier Gutierrez-Rexach (ed.) Semantics: Critical concepts in linguistics, Routledge, 2003.
Roberts, Craige (2002) Demonstratives as definites. In Kees van Deemter and Roger Kibble (eds.) Information Sharing: Reference and Presupposition in Language Generation and Interpretation, CSLI Press, pp.89-196.
Roberts, Craige (2003) Uniqueness in definite noun phrases. Linguistics and Philosophy 26:287-350.
Roberts, Craige (2005) Pronouns as definites. In M. Reimer & A. Bezuidenhout (eds.) Descriptions and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 503-543.
Roberts, Craige (in press) Contextual influences on reference. For B. Abbott & J. Gundel (eds.) Oxford Handbook on Reference. Oxford University Press.
Roberts, Craige (forthcoming) Modal subordination: It would eat you first!. Solicited for a handbook on semantics edited by Matthewson, Meier, Rullmann & Zimmermann.
Paul Elbourne (2008) Demonstratives as individual concepts. Linguistics and Philosophy 31:409-466.
on Pro-drop in Brazilian Portuguese:
Duarte, Inês & Maria Cristina Figueiredo Silva (2016) The null subject parameter and the structure of the sentence in European and Brazilian Portuguese. In W. L. Wetzels, J. Costa & S. Menuzzi (eds.) The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics. Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, Chapter 16, doi: 10.1002/9781118791844.
Cyrino, Sonia & Gabriela Matos (2016) Null objects and VP ellipsis in European and Brazilian Portuguese. In W. L. Wetzels, J. Costa & S. Menuzzi (eds.) The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics. Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, Chapter 16, doi: 10.1002/9781118791844.
Schwenter, Scott A. (2006). Null Objects Across South America. In T. L. Face & C. L. Klee (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 23-36). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Schwenter, Scott A. (2014) Two kinds of differential object marking in Portuguese and Spanish. In Patricia Amaral & Ana Maria Carvalho (eds.) Portuguese-Spanish Interfaces: Diachrony synchrony and contact. John Benjamins.
