The Interpretation of Complement Anaphorae: the case of The Others

The Interpretation of Complement Anaphora: The Case of The Others∗ Nobuaki Akagi Centre for Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University nobuakagi@mq.edu.au Francesco-Alessio Ursini Centre for Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University francescoalessio.ursini@mq.edu.au Abstract This paper presents an experimental study on the interpretation of the complement anaphora the others in inter-sentential discourse. aims to offer an answer to the followingIt two empirical questions. First, how comple- ment anaphora denote the “complement set”, a set of referents that includes those referents not denoted by the matching anaphoric an- tecedent. Second, what are the exact interpre- tation principles that govern the anaphoric po- tential of complement anaphora. The answers to these two questions shed light on how com- plement anaphora fit into a broader theory of anaphora resolution, and what is the most ac- curate logical and psychological model of this aspect of grammar. 1 Introduction Complement anaphora can be seen as a particu- lar sub-set of natural language anaphora. Noun phrases (NPs) that act as complement anaphora usu- ally occur in inter-sentential environments (e.g. dis- courses). These NPs appear to refer not to the rel- evant set of discourse referents currently under dis- cussion1, but rather to the set making up the “rest” of discourse referents. ∗We would like to thank the participants for their involve- ment in the experiment. We would also like two thank three anonymous reviewers for suggestions and comments, which we think helped in improving the paper. The second author would like to thank his Princess for the constant support and encouragement. 1We adopt the standard practice of dynamic semantics ap- proaches and label as “discourse referents” the individuals in the Universe of Discourse denoted by NPs (Kartunnen, 1976; The semantic properties of complement anaphora were first discussed in Moxey and Sanford (1993), who investigated these anaphora from an experimen- tal perspective. They can be illustrated in a simple and pre-theoretical way via the following examples: (1) Few children ate their ice-cream. They chose strawberry flavor (2) Few children ate their ice-cream. They threw it around the room instead (3) Few children ate their ice-cream. The others threw it around the room instead Consider the mini-discourses in examples (1)-(3) as being uttered in a context in which there are nine children, but only three children ate their ice-cream out of these nine. The first sentence in each mini- discourse denotes the set of three children that ate their ice-cream, and thus focuses on a certain rel- evant set of children. The anaphoric (pronominal) NPs they and the others, however, differ with respect to the anaphoric relation they establish. In (1), they refers to the three children who ate ice-cream, and combines with the second verb phrase (i.e. chose strawberry flavor), which further explains the chil- dren’s choices. In (2), they refers to those children who did not eat their ice-cream, but decided to do something else with it, as the second verb phrase clarifies (i.e. threw it around the room). Kamp, 1981; Heim, 1982). We assume …

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