UC Santa Cruz

The dissertation takes as its subject the typology of anaphora, that class of expressions which in some intuitive sense `refer back' to previously mentioned material. Although anaphora have been fairly well-studied, there has been little in the way of work on the typology of anaphora since landmark work in the 1970s and 1980s. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to examine that typology, and to show that the typology as it currently stands is too coarse to account for the many subtle variations that we see in anaphoric expressions; it must be made more fine-grained. I take as my focus the category of surface anaphors, which are anaphors that must look to the linguistic discourse for their interpretation. Using several case studies from Germanic languages, I show that the traditional category of surface anaphora should be divided into several sub-categories, based on the type of internal structure which the anaphor contains; in particular, I divide surface anaphora into the traditional ellipses, which have internal syntax, and what I term mixed anaphora, which behave as if they have no internal structure in the narrow syntax. I go on to show that the wide variety of behavior we see can be accounted for if natural language allows both deletion and copying as possible strategies for deriving anaphors.