Towards a Unified, Semantically-Calculable and Anti-lexicalistic Analysis of Various Anaphoric Expressions Using “Stacked” Continuations

Abstract

This paper takes an initial step to boil down the notion of (anti-)locality (or Binding Conditions A and B) of anaphoric expressions into semantic and morphological formalisms. Inspired by[15], this paper proposes a substructure internal to NPs which mirrors the verb cartography. This mirroring tree constitutes a stacked continuation which takes all the verbal heads one by one from the bottom to the root of the sentence. The tree can then be broken down to a part of a covert reflexivizer and the remaining dummy parts, the latter being filled with overt anaphoric morphemes. This treatment of anaphoric NPs enables a compositional analysis of complex anaphors (which tend to be local) and is subsumed under an established semantics and anti-lexalistic morphology. This paper also discusses more complex cases of multiple anaphors, verbal syncretism and non-c-commanding antecedents.