PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS OF DEEP AND … · PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS OF DEEP AND ... example of anaphora in English is a pronoun that is tied to a previous element ... Hasan (1976),

Journal of Pragmatics 9 (1985) 7855813

North-Holland

785

PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS OF DEEP AND SURFACE ANAPHORA

Gregory L. MURPHY*

A distinction has been made between two classes of anaphora. One class can take as antecedents

not only linguistic constituents, but also objects and events in the extra-linguistic context. The other

class accepts only certain linguistic elements as antecedents. It is not well understood why there should be two such classes, nor why a given form of anaphora is in one class rather than the other.

This article attempts to explain the existence of the two classes by analyzing the difficulty a listener

would have in recovering the antecedents of various forms of anaphora. This analysis suggests that

it is intrinsically more difficult to discover the antecedents of some forms than of others, and that it

is just these forms (with one exception) that have restrictions on acceptable antecedents. Therefore,

the grammatical distinction between these two classes is not arbitrary, but subserves an important

communicative function - that of ensuring that antecedents for anaphors are always recoverable.

1. Introduction

Anaphora is a pervasive and essential linguistic phenomenon. The prototypical example of anaphora in English is a pronoun that is tied to a previous element in order to receive an interpretation. Furthermore, much definite reference is anaphoric, as shown in (1):

(1) Chris bought a best-seller about the fashion industry. (a) It was execrable. (b) The book was execrable.

Anaphora allows speakers to be succinct by eliminating unnecessary redundancy. Linguists have sometimes restricted the term ‘anaphora’ to forms that are tied to some previous linguistic element, using ‘cataphora’ (or ‘backwards anaphora’) when a form is tied to a following element (e.g., Halliday and Hasan (1976), Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik (1972)). However,

* Some of the discussion presented here is based on a Ph.D. thesis submitted to Stanford

University. I am glad to acknowledge the helpful comments of Barbara Malt, Ivan Sag, Thomas

Wasow and especially Patricia Clancy and Herbert Clark on the thesis and/or earlier versions of this article. Preparation of this article was supported by NSF grant 83-15145.

Author’s address: Gregory L. Murphy, Department of Psychology, Brown University, Provi- dence, RI 02912, USA.

037%2166/85/$ 3.30 0 1985, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)

786 G.L. Murphy / Deep and surface anaphora

‘anaphora’ has also been used to describe both cases as well as similar phe- nomena in which an element is tied to some extralinguistic object or event - called ‘exophora’ by Halliday and Hasan. I will use the word in this broader sense.

One justification for considering these linguistic and extra-linguistic rela- tionships as being cut from the same cloth is that many of the same forms appear in both situations, as in these pairs:

(2a) See the guy with the sweater? He’s a skin diver. (2b) (Pointing to a man.) He’s a skin diver. (3a) Lee: I had 10 beers.

Chris: I wish you wouldn’t drink so much. (3b) (After a party, Lee staggers to the car.)

Chris: I wish you wouldn’t drink so much.

(4a) Jean swallowed the fish whole, but I couldn’t do it.

(4b) (Jean swallows a fish whole.) I never thought you would do it.

In each of these examples, an element (the ‘anaphor’) is tied to something mentioned in the text in the (a) sentences and to something available in the speaker’s and listener’s context in the (b) sentences. Although there is a distinction to be made between linguistic and extra-linguistic anaphora in

principle, these examples suggest that they will have similar explanations. However, a serious problem for interpreting all anaphora as a unified

phenomenon is the finding by Hankamer and Sag (1976) that some anaphors can only be controlled by linguistic antecedents (unlike the extralinguistic controllers used in (2b)-(4b)). For example:

(5) Pat’s going to cut that person in half. I hope she doesn’t.

(6) (Pat holds a running power saw over a handcuffed victim.) *I hope she doesn’t.

(7) Someone’s killed the vicar, and I know who (8) (The lights go out for a moment and a shot rings out. When the lights

return, the vicar is dead.) The detective: *I know who

These examples show that some anaphors require linguistic antecedents. There is nothing wrong with the contexts in these examples, since other anaphors are able to use the same contexts as the antecedent: In (6), I hope she doesn’t do it

would be acceptable, and in (8), I know who did it is possible. Hankamer and Sag provide evidence that it is in fact a property of some anaphoric forms that they require a linguistic controller. The purpose of this article is to investigate the difference between anaphors that can take a wide range of antecedents and those that can only take a narrow range of linguistic antecedents.

G.L. Murphy / Deep and surface anaphora 781

Hankamer and Sag (1976) formalized the distinction between these two types of anaphora and noted other differences between them. The type required to take a linguistic antecedent as in (5) and (7) they named surface anuphoru. They also noted that the antecedent of surface anaphors must be consistent at a surface level with the anaphoric sentence. That is, roughly speaking, one must be able to replace the anaphor with the antecedent and have the result be a grammatical sentence. This consistency criterion is needed to explain such examples as:

(9a) *The newspaper was read by Pat, and Fran did too. (9b) Pat read the newspaper, and Fran did too. (10a) *The garbage needed to be taken out, so Chris did. (lob) Someone had to take out the garbage, so Chris did.

Hankamer and Sag (1976) and Sag (1979) used these examples to argue that surface anaphors are produced by deletion under identity with an antecedent. In (9b) and (lob), there is an antecedent that could act as such a deletion controller: (lob) could have an underlying form something like, Someone had

to take out the garbage, so Chris took out the garbage. Both clauses contain take out the garbage, allowing one of them to be deleted (the tense marking on the second clause gets ‘left behind’ and added to the pro-verb do). Examples (9a) and (lOa) have no such surface constituent: (10a) might have the underlying form, The garbage had to be taken out, so Chris took out the garbage, which does not have an identical constituent in the two clauses.’ In

short, surface anaphora allows only linguistic antecedents that are consistent (in this sense) with the anaphor. Hankamer and Sag’s deep unuphoru does not have such restrictions:

(11) The newspaper was read by Pat, and Lee did it too. (12) The garbage needed to be taken out, so Chris did it.

Moreover, these are just the forms that can be exophorically controlled. These facts led Hankamer and Sag to argue that deep anaphora is generated directly in deep structure and its anaphoric relations determined by semantic interpretation procedures. Examples of proposed deep and surface anaphora are shown in tables 1 and 2.

My interest here is not in Hankamer and Sag’s proposals about the syntactic analysis of these forms. (See Schachter (1977) and Williams (1977) for criti- cisms, and Hankamer (1978) and Sag (1979) for responses.) What is crucial

’ This description is over-simplified: exactly how the two constituents must be ‘identical’ is a complex matter. Sag and Hankamer (1984) now suggest that logical or propositional identity is necessary, though even this runs into problems when indexicals are involved. Since their definition

of propositional structure is close to traditional surface structure, I use this more familiar criterion. Nothing in my argument turns on the exact form of the identity criterion, however.


here is the distinction between one class of anaphora that allows a variety of linguistic and extra-linguistic antecedents and another class that allows only linguistic antecedents that are ‘consistent’. Although there may be controversy about how best to account for this distinction in linguistic theory, the data presented above suggest that there is indeed a distinction to be made (see Hankamer (1978) and Sag (1979) for more examples and discussion).2 There- fore, I shall be using the terms ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ in a descriptive way, to

separate the anaphoric forms that seem to have these different characteristics. This use does not entail a particular linguistic account of these differences.

Table 1 Examples of surface anaphora.’

Verb phrase ellipsis

Sluicing

Stripping

So anaphora

Gautrine

I can’t see the problem, but Lee can.

John was going to the station, but he didn’t say when.

Gwen snorts cocaine, but not in her own house.

You say she is guilty, but do you really think so?

Leslie drove the car. and Kim the moued.

r These examples are adapted from Sag (1979).

Table 2

Examples of deep anaphora.’

Do if anaphora Jones couldn’t flip the pancake, so Smith did it.

Sentential it anaphora I mean business, but I can’t get anyone to believe it.

Null complement anaphora Johnson told me to wash his car, but I wouldn’t comply.

One anaphora Richard bought a blue shirt and returned the red one.

1 These examples are adapted from Sag (1979).

If this distinction is accepted as descriptively correct, one would not be satisfied with simply classifying all anaphors as either surface or deep, and writing different rules for them in the grammar. The question immediately arises as to why there is such a distinction. The other possibilities have much to recommend themselves: if all anaphora were deep, then it would be more flexible and easier to learn (since there would be fewer linguistic restrictions); if all anaphora were surface, antecedent recovery would be less ambiguous, since potentially vague extralinguistic controllers would be ruled out as antecedents. In either case, speakers would not have to learn which anaphors are deep and which are surface. After comparing the two classes (see tables 1 and 2), one

* .This is not to say that the distinction has no exceptions. One can find apparent examples of

surface anaphora that are pragmatically controlled or whose antecedents violate the consistency criterion. Whether these are ‘performance errors’ or more serious violations is unclear. What is clear is that there is a qualitative difference between the surface and deep forms in their ability to take antecedents: deep forms can take pragmatic control as a rule, and surface forms only for a few

‘exceptions’. These exceptions will be important data for psychologists constructing performance models of anaphora comprehension, but are beyond this discussion.


might conclude that the distinction is nearly arbitrary: verb phrase ellipsis differs little from do it anaphora; null complement anaphora differs little from sluicing, yet one member of each pair is surface and one is deep. Why? If we were to ‘discover’ a new form of anaphora, perhaps in another language, how would we predict which class it would be in? This article attempts to answer these questions.

The reader may have noticed that all of the examples so far have been in English. The literature on the deep/surface anaphora distinction has been almost exclusively based on English data (one exception is Tasmowski-De Ryck and Verluyten (1981)), though the distinction is applicable to all languages. As will become clear, the principles proposed to explain the distinction are universal. (However, the translation of an English anaphor into another language will not necessarily be in the same class as the original, because of slight semantic and syntactic differences.) English anaphors are used in all theexamples here merely to facilitate comparison of different forms and to

retain continuity with the literature. Similar analyses of anaphora in other languages would be very welcome.

2. Previous explanations

Hankamer and Sag (1976) provided little explanation for why English should have two classes of anaphora. Their intuitive rationale was (1976: 425): “Language provides us with two ways to avoid redundancy: redundancy at the deep level can be eliminated by substituting a deep anaphor for a semantic unit that appears elsewhere in the discourse or context; redundancy at the surface level can be eliminated by substituting a surface anaphor (generally null) for a surface segment that appears elsewhere in the linguistic structure (including wider discourse)“. By itself, this suggestion leaves much unanswered. For example, it does not give any insight as to why a particular anaphoric form should be surface instead of deep - presumably the choice is completely arbitrary. More generally, it does not explain why all anaphora is not subject only to the constraint that the antecedent be recoverable, whether it be a linguistic constituent or part of the context. In other words, it explains why

(9b), (lob), (11) and (12) are possible, but not why (6) (8), (9a) and (lOa) are impossible.

Sag and Hankamer (1984) proposed a more complete explanation. They suggested that the two classes of anaphora correspond to two different understanding processes. In particular, they argued that surface anaphora requires the listener to search short-term memory for a linguistic antecendent that completes the sentence. If no antecedent is available, understanding will be difficult or impossible. For deep anaphora, listeners were said to use a pragmatic strategy to interpret the sentence. This strategy would operate on a

790 G.L. Murphy / Deep and surface unaphoru

discourse model (see Johnson-Laird (198 1, 1984) Webber (1979)) that would include information from the context as well as that evoked by the discourse or text. Since the discourse model is assumed to be represented more abstractly than the level of syntactic analysis, deep anaphora would not be affected by the surface consistency of the antecedent. In fact, the discourse model would include many things never said in the discourse but mutually known by the participants (see Clark and Carlson (1981)). These two understanding strategies, recovery of a linguistic antecedent and search through a discourse model, employ different memory structures and processes, perhaps thereby causing the linguistic differences.

As psychologists have found some evidence for the distinction between surface or ‘propositional’ representations and the discourse model (Ehrlich and

Johnson-Laird (1982)), Sag and Hankamer (1984) argued that this was a natural explanation of the linguistic distinction - that the two sorts of anaphora could be distinguished through a performance model of how anaphors are produced and interpreted. The problem with this proposal is that it does not explain the difference between deep and surface anaphora in terms of already understood principles. That is, the psychological account is a prediction of their linguistic theory rather than an explanation of it - their explanation has a serious chicken-and-egg problem. However, it well become apparent that I concur with Sag and Hankamer’s general intent, to use psychological principles of language understanding to explain why there should be such a distinction.

Sag and Hankamer’s account attempts to explain a linguistic distinction in terms of a psychological distinction. However, this psychological distinction is precisely as mysterious as the original linguistic one: although the existence of both propositional and more abstract model-based representations of discourse may be accepted, there is no reason to believe that some sentences should access one representation but not the other. For example, imagine that you have come across (13) in a text:

(13a) . . . so I did. (13b) . so I did it.

If Sag and Hankamer are correct, then upon reading (13a), you searched your memory for an appropriate linguistic constituent to interpret the anaphor. You did not, however, search your discourse model for a plausible interpretation (at least, not at first). In (13b), the case is reversed: you were uninterested in the previous linguistic content, looking only for some action already in the discourse model that could plausibly complete the sentence. Even if this prediction were correct, it would leave unanswered precisely the question we started out to answer: why do similar anaphors have such different properties? Why doesn’t the reader use the same understanding processes for both? If the


answer is because one is a ‘deep’ and the other a ‘surface’ anaphor, then we

have come full circle.3 Therefore, even if the proposed explanation were correct, the puzzle of why

there is a processing distinction between deep and surface anaphora would remain. Sag and Hankamer (1984) propose no psychological principle to solve this puzzle - their explanation transforms an arbitrary linguistic distinction into an arbitrary psychological distinction.

A second. problem for this explanation is that it did not receive empirical support in experiments reported by Murphy (1982, 1985). On the basis of these experiments, I concluded that both surface and deep anaphors were understood by using both sorts of information (surface and model-based) about the antecedent. In other words, readers used whatever available information they could to understand the anaphor. However, even if the empirical evidence had supported Sag and Hankamer’s proposal (see Tanenhaus and Carlson (1984)), we would still have wanted to know why different anaphoric forms engender different processing strategies.

3. A new explanation

Although I have argued against Sag and Hankamer’s particular explanation, their attempt to find a processing explanation for the difference between surface and deep anaphors was potentially fruitful. My proposal will not be to try to reduce the linguistic distinction to a psychological one. Rather, I will try to motivate the distinction on the basis of comprehensibility differences between the forms. I argue that the distinction is not an arbitrary one, but rather that it has some useful communicative function, and I attempt to explicate what that function might be, using reasonable psycholinguistic principles.

The proposed explanation is based on the recoverability of the antecedent. All language understanding is characterized by the listener using features of the message combined with assumptions about communication to recover certain of the speaker’s intentions (Grice (1957)). Anaphora places a good deal of stress on the understander, in that the anaphoric phrase does not bear a direct relationship to the intended meaning - the antecedent must first be discovered and then used as an intermediary. Anaphoric utterances therefore have a greater potential for ambiguity than do non-anaphoric utterances. Once the correct antecedent has been found, the rest of the interpretation reduces to normal (non-anaphoric) understanding. If this is roughly correct, the most

3 Even if one takes the more moderate view that deep anaphors have only preferred or faster access to the discourse model (rather than being interpreted exclusively through it), the reason for

this preference, and the opposite preference for surface anaphora, needs to be given.

792 G.L. Murphy 1 Deep and surface anaphora

important difference between anaphoric and non-anaphoric sentences is the task of finding the correct antecedent. Therefore, the existence of two distinct forms of anaphora may be related to differences in the ease of recovering antecedents. Specifically, deep anaphora may consist of forms that are natu- rally less ambiguous than surface forms. (I use ‘ambiguity’ here and throughout the article to refer to the number of possible interpretations an anaphor has.) In fact, differences in possible antecedents is one of the defining characteristics of the deep/surface distinction. Deep anaphora can be controlled by a wide variety of antecedents, whereas surface anaphora can take only a restricted set of antecedents. Thus, there is some reason to think that the motivation for the deep/surface distinction is related to difficulty in recovering the correct antecedent.

How could one determine which anaphors allow easy recovery of their antecedents? Two plausible determinants are: (1) the range of possible antecedents for that form, and (2) the quality of the anaphoric utterance as a clue to the correct antecedent. The first factor indicates that some anaphors can substitute for one or two types of things, whereas others can substitute for many different types of things. Clearly, if the anaphor is limited in what it can substitute for, recovering the antecedent will be easy - one only needs to consider the small class of possible antecedents. Other anaphors that are less restricted will pose a greater problem - the size of the search space is larger. What sort of limitations could there be on the types of ‘things’ referred to? Both syntactic and semantic limitations seem likely. Some anaphors may only allow certain syntactic constituents (e.g., NPs, verbs) to be their antecedents. Some anaphors could require that the antecedent refer to an event, to an inanimate object or some other semantically defined class. Either of these restrictions could make it easier for a listener to interpret the anaphor by reducing the number of possible antecedents. (When a listener interprets an anaphor, the pragmatics of the situation will also certainly influence the interpretation. However, this should be true for all anaphoric forms and therefore will not help explain why there are two classes of anaphora.)

The second factor acknowledges the fact that some anaphors provide a richer basis for interpretation than others; that is, they provide a better ‘clue’ for the antecedent. Again, these factors can be both syntactic and semantic. Some anaphoric forms always occur in sentences that have a main clause, whereas others can consist of only an isolated constituent. Some forms seem to carry significant meaning, whereas others consist of nearly meaningless substitute elements or ellipsis. Longer, more complete anaphoric sentences should provide a better clue to the antecedent.

Given these two sources of difficulty in recovering the antecedent, a plausible hypothesis is that, compared to deep ,anaphors, surface anaphors have larger sets of possible antecedents, or impoverished sentential contexts acting as cues, or both. Because of this, surface forms have been restricted by the grammar so

G.L. Murphy 1 Deep and surface anaphora 793

that they will only be used when there is an explicit linguistic antecedent of the correct form - otherwise the interpretation of surface anaphora would be too ambiguous; that is, the correct antecedent might not be chose. (Schachter (1977,1978) has made some similar observations, though he draws quite different conclusions. See the discussion at the end of the article.)

My argument follows the form of those made by investigators in language universals and functional approaches to grammar (e.g., Bates and Mac- Whinney (1982), Clark and Clark (1977: ch. 14), Given (1979) Greenberg (1966)) who attempt to trace grammatical regularities to psychological mechanisms. That is, I argue that the deep/surface distinction serves the purpose of avoiding ambiguity and difficult computations during comprehension. The argument can be seen as a historical one, though I do not consider historical evidence: during the history of English and its predecessors, speakers used anaphora only when the antecedent was recoverable, but the deep/surface distinction may not have always been a component of the grammar. Acting on cooperative principles, speakers never produced isolated utterances like (14), expecting people to understand what was meant:

(14a) In the meeting. (14b) Lee Sandy.

Such potentially ambiguous anaphora was used only when the antecedent was explicit, as in (15):

(15a) Where did you hear that? In the meeting.

(15b) Chris likes Pat, and Lee Sandy.

Presumably, over years of use this practice became conventionalized, that is, part of the grammar (see Given (1979) for many such examples). Certain types of anaphora that were usually produced with explicit antecedents (like those in (15)) were then required by the grammar to have such antecedents - even in cases where the meaning was clear without one. These forms became those identified by Hankamer and Sag as surface anaphora, and the forms that required no such antecedent became those now known as deep anaphora. Of course, the opposite sequence is a possibility (all anaphora requiring certain linguistic antecedents at first), but either sequence is consistent with the claim that recoverability of the antecedent is responsible for the deep/surface distinction. (Chomsky (1965) argued that recoverability of deleted material was a general constraint on transformations, presumably based on similar functional reasoning.)

In order to discuss this proposal, the recoverability explanation, I need to examine both of the factors that determine recoverability: the number of

794 G.L. Murphy / Deep and swface anaphora

possible antecedents and the clues provided by the sentence containing the anaphor. For each form, I try to define the information that needs to be recovered and the information given as a clue in the anaphor, where ‘information’ is a neutral term, including syntactic, semantic and pragmatic content. So, an anaphoric form that requires recovery of a whole proposition would be more likely to be surface than one that requires recovery of a mentioned object; a form that contains a subject and verb would be more likely to be deep than one that contains only a subject, since the former provides a better retrieval clue.

There are three restrictions that must be put on this comparison. First, the examination must ignore the deep/surface distinction itself, or else it would become circular. For example, I must consider how difficult it would be to recover non-linguistic antecedents for both forms of anaphora (even though surface forms should never have such antecedents). Second, it is unilluminating to discuss factors that are roughly constant across all the forms, since these cannot explain any differences between them. Therefore, I do not mention general principles of language use that operate in understanding all the forms. For example, it is assumed that use of all of these forms depends on pragmatic

and cooperative principles. Third, I do not consider combinations of anaphors in a single sentence. Although these are common enough, there are too many possible combinations to consider, and they do not help to differentiate individual forms.

Sag’s (1979) taxonomy of anaphoric forms provides a scaffolding for the discussion, and many of my examples are slightly adapted from his. Where possible, I contrast forms that are similar on one factor but different on the other in order to make clear predictions about which forms should be deep and which surface.4

4. Individual forms

The purpose of this section is to characterize each anaphoric form on the two dimensions of recoverability, following the guidelines presented above. How- ever, when there are other salient properties of the form that might affect its comprehensibility, they are presented as well.

Pronominalization. I consider three sorts of pronominalization: personal pronouns, one(s) pronominalization, and sentential it anaphora. All of these cases are clearly deep anaphora, since they can all be pragmatically controlled (see (1) and (2)) and they can take linguistically introduced antecedents that do not pass the consistency criterion. For example:

4 A more complete treatment would be to place each form relative to all the others on an imaginary recoverability scale. But because the forms vary along both recoverability factors

simultaneously and there is no way to combine the factors to get a single score for each form, this is not possible, except for a few cases that are clearly different on both factors.


(16) A woman I met was eating fish heads. Why was she doing that?

She refers to the mentioned woman, whose complete description (including that the speaker met her and that she was eating fish heads) is not contained in any coherent surface constituent (see Clark and Marshall (1981), Webber (1979) for a discussion of the problems this fact raises).

As is well known, pronouns cannot be used interchangeably with other definite descriptions (see Lasnik (1976) and Reinhart (1983) for reviews). However, the way in which they are interpreted must be very similar to the way descriptions are interpreted: the element in the discourse model that best fits the description given the context, salience of the possible referents and mutual knowledge of speaker and hearer, is chosen as the referent (Clark and Marshall (1981), Johnson-Laird (1984)).

For personal pronouns, what information in the pronoun or the sentence containing it acts as a clue to the antecedent? The number and gender of the pronoun greatly restrict possible referents, and the rest of the sentence adds strong semantic and pragmatic clues. For example, She is eating restricts the referent of she to a single animate female capable of ingestion. Longer, richer sentences add proportionally more context to act as a recovery clue. What information needs to be recovered from the antecedent? In the case of personal pronouns, it is always a reference to a person or thing, of which there will generally be a rather small set of possibilities in context. Recovery of the

antecedent here seems to be fairly easy. (Exactly how easy can be seen when pronouns are compared to the other forms discussed below.)

For one anaphora, the ‘clue’ is the same except for the gender information in the pronoun. The missing information is the description of an object already mentioned (one is an example of ‘identity of sense anaphora’). That is, One is eating does not refer to an element already distinguished in the discourse

model, but some such object acts as an antecedent to help establish a new referent (see Murphy (1984)). But the simple problem of recoverability seems virtually identical in one anaphora and personal pronouns, since the missing description is always of a person or object (rather than a predicate or a proposition).

Sentential it anaphora is so called because the pronoun can be replaced with a full clause:

(17) Fran: I just won a million dollars. Chris: I don’t believe it! (it = You just won a million dollars)

The anaphor can be pragmatically controlled (e.g., instead of a sentence by Fran above, Chris could have seen the million-dollar check handed over). Also, it can refer to a sentence that cannot replace the it, suggesting that the consistency criterion does not apply:

796 G.L. Murphy 1 Deep and surface anaphora

(18) Lee: A phone book Hiram ripped in half. (a) Sandy: I don’t believe it! (b) Sandy: *I don’t believe a phone book Hiram ripped in half!

Like any pronoun, sentential it receives many clues to its referent from the anaphoric sentence, that is, the verb, subject or object, and any prepositional phrases. (Other forms described below lack this information, and therefore provide poorer clues.) However, the set of possible antecedents is quite large, since any event or state in the discourse model is a possible controller. That is, any proposition, even complex, embedded ones, can serve as the antecedent.

Personal pronouns and one anaphora seem to be clear cases where recovery of the antecedent should be easy: the anaphoric sentence and context provide plenty of clues, and the possible referents are severely restricted. It should be no surprise then that these are types of deep anaphora. Sentential if anaphora has roughly comparable information in the anaphoric sentence, but it seems to have a much larger (more ambiguous) set of possible antecedents, including any event, state, or vaguely specified situation. This form seems more ambiguous than the other pronouns, and it is not clear that it should be deep (on the recoverability account). I return to this question after considering other forms of anaphora.

Verb-phrase ellipsis. This form is particularly interesting, because, although it is a surface form, it often differs from do it anaphora by only one or two words. In this section, I will discuss the type of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) that strands an auxiliary or a copula as in (19) :

(19a) John took an apple. Lee did too. (19b) Mary was a colonel. Sandy was too.

I postpone discussion of the genre of VPE that strands the complementizer to, as in (20):

(20) Although Lee wanted to, she didn’t take an apple.

As documented earlier (examples (+(lO)), VPE requires a consistent linguistic antecedent, and so is a type of surface anaphora. The major clue to the antecedent provided by VPE is the pragmatic constraint provided by the sentence subject: Lee in Lee did too, or Sandy in Sandy was. The stranded auxiliary contains some information, since did cannot take a copulative antecedent (e.g., *The dog is brown and the cat did too), but the tense, number and aspect information is all new ~ the auxiliary agrees with the subject of the anaphoric clause but not necessarly with the antecedent’s subject. (Notice that the number and gender of pronouns, for example, do agree with their antecedents.) Thus, these ‘clues’ are of little help in recovering the antecedent.


For example, Lee will next week uses a modal that refers to an action in the future, but this does not restrict the modality or time frame of the antecedent:

(21a) Sandy minds the baby this week, and Lee will next week. (21b) I washed the cat yesterday, and Lee will tomorrow.

Thus, the main clue provided by the anaphoric clause is the sentence subject, plus any adverbial phrases that might be added, which pragmatically constrain interpretations of the anaphor. The missing information is some predicate ~ any event or state - which encompasses a large set of possibilities.

Do it amphora. This form of anaphora seems very similar to some cases of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE), which is a surface form, so it might be thought that it should also be a surface form. It is not, however: it can be pragmatically controlled (see (4))‘and its linguistic antecedent need not be consistent.

(22a) *If the oats need to be taken down to the bin, then I will. (22b) If the oats need to be taken down to the bin, then I’ll do it.

The addition of do it in (22b) seems to add little to the information in (22a), so it must be explained why (22b) should be grammatical and (22a) not. It will be useful, then, to compare the two forms here.

There are two main differences between do it anaphora and VPE that may account for this difference. The first one is in the anaphoric verb: the do in do it is the main verb do, rather than the special pro-verb sometimes used in VPE. (Schachter (1977) has also noted this difference.) This verb has particular selectional restrictions that constrain the set of possible anaphors: do it must refer to an intentional action, and it usually takes an animate subject. (This analysis is not exhaustive, but the semantics of do is not the topic here, so I will not be any more detailed.) For example:

(23) Jean saw’the accident. (a) I thought Chris did. (b) *I thought Chris did it. (did it = saw the accident)

Notice that VPE (23a) is acceptable here, but do it anaphora is not: VPE can take stative and ‘experiential’ predicates as antecedents but do it anaphora cannot. Thus, VPE has a larger set of possible antecedents and therefore more potential for ambiguity. Quirk et al. (1972: 691) provide support for the proposed difference between the two forms. They divided verbs into seven major types, and claimed that VPE can act as a substitute for any of them, but do it for only two of them.

The second difference between do it and VPE seems due to the it. It should refer to a discrete object, action or specific event rather than to a continuing process or state. Hence,

798 G.L. Murphy / Deep dnd m-face amphora

(24) Does Hiram eat roast wallaby?

(a) No, but Ed does. (b) *No, but Ed does it.

(These examples are difficult to construct because the antecedent can often be re-interpreted as referring to a discrete event that was not the intended antecedent. Thus some seemingly acceptable sentences like (24b) may not be

counterexamples to this restriction.) Notice that this restriction is independent of the first: eat is an intentional action verb that can easily be an antecedent for do it when it refers to discrete events:

(25) Hiram just ate my cookie! No, Ed did it.

Although these factors may not seem like serious restrictions, they do considerably narrow the range of possible antecedents (and thereby lessen the chance for misunderstanding) compared to VPE. For example, the case of VPE below is ambiguous where do it is not.

(26) Jane saw Barbara pull the plug. (a) I thought Amy did. (b) I thought Amy did it.

In (26a), the interpretation could be either that Amy saw Barbara pull the plug or that Amy pulled the plug herself; in (26b), Amy could only have pulled the plug, because see is not an intentional verb. These examples show that do it

does not just refer to whatever ‘makes sense’ in the discourse: the lexical- semantic properties of do it make it more informative than VPE even when there is a linguistic antecedent.

Null complement anaphora. Null complement anaphora is characterized by the deletion of a complement clause, including the complementizer. Sag’s (1979) example is:

(27) They asked me to leave but I refused.

It is pragmatically controllable:

(28) (Each student is juggling balls on the front lawn. Sandy notices Lee is the only one not juggling.) Sandy: I can’t believe that you refused.

G.L. Murphy / Deep and surface anaphora

And the antecedent need not be consistent with the anaphor:

(29) The garbage needs to be taken out. Well. I refuse.

Notice that the anaphoric sentence must contain at least one clause, by definition, and so provides a better clue to the correct antecedent than VPE, whose main clue was only the sentence subject. The subject and verb of the matrix clause are present, and the subject of the complementary clause is known by virtue of the complementation rule that the main verb follows (i.e., whether the verb is in the traditional categories of subject-to-subject raising, object-controlled equi, etc.). For example, in I refuse, the subject of the deleted complement must be ‘I’ (I refuse that I take out the garbage). So, although null complement anaphora is syntactically missing a clause, only the information of a predicate must be recovered.

The set of possible missing complements is pragmatically restricted by the matrix clause, a piece of information not found in VPE. The information value of this clause depends greatly on the verb used, but many of them supply information that restricts antecedents even more than do it does: agree, refuse, decline, attempt, succeed, let, promise, etc. In context, there is a small number of things that a person could plausibly promise or refuse, whereas there is a larger number of things that someone could ‘do’. In summary, VPE and null complement anaphora both need to recover predicates, but null complement anaphora contains a much richer clue to the antecedent.

If the recoverability explanation is correct, then a distinction made by Hankamer and Sag (1976: 414) is difficult to explain. They point out that (30a) is a case of null complement anaphora, but (30b) is technically a case of VPE, since part of the complement is present, and only the VP-is deleted. I call this form ‘camp-VPE’ in order to distinguish it from the VPE form I discussed previously, which, I will argue, has very different recoverability characteristics.

(30a) I don’t see why you even try. (30b) I don’t see why you even try to.

The information value of try to seems, if anything, greater than that of try, yet it is said to be a surface form. However, the form shown in (30b) is not so clearly surface anaphora as Hankamer and Sag claim. For example, it does not always require a semantically consistent antecedent:

(31) The garbage needs to be taken out. (a) Well, I don’t want to. (b) Well, I refuse to.

800 G.L. Murphy I Deep and surface anaphora

And this form seems susceptible to pragmatic control:

(32) (Each person at the table swallows a goldfish whole.) Sandy: Come on, Lee, it’s your turn. (a) Lee: Not me, I refuse to.

(b) Lee: Do I have to? (c) Lee: I don’t think I’m able to.

These sorts of examples raise doubts as to whether camp-VPE is surface anaphora. Of course, there may be good arguments for camp-VPE being formally similar to the other VPE forms. However, this does not entail that they have the same recoverability characteristics. (31) and (32) suggest that camp-VPE is a deep form, like null complement anaphora but unlike the usual VPE.

Hankamer and Sag claim that (30b) is unacceptable when pragmatically controlled, and in a later paper (Sag and Hankamer (1984: 339)) they give some judgments that contradict (31). My intuitions do not correspond to theirs: (30b), (31) and (32) all sound perfectly good to me, and their own examples only sound slightly stilted. Furthermore, informants tell me that these (spoken) examples do not sound unnatural. Perhaps these examples would not be considered good writing style, because the antecedent is not given explicitly in the text, but the data from verbal judgments give only weak support for the categorization of this form as surface anaphora, and so do not constitute clear evidence against the recoverability explanation.

Finally, there are cases that Hankamer and Sag report for which I agree that the camp-VPE form does not allow pragmatic control, but many of these do not contradict the recoverability explanation. For example, they discuss:

(33) (Brian watches Gordon attempting to stuff a 12” ball through a 6” hoop.) Brian: *I don’t think you’ll be able to.

But notice that the null complement version is also bad:

(34) Brian: *I dont’t think you’ll be able.

Therefore, the example does not show that null complement anaphora is allowable when camp-VPE is not. (For some speakers, he able never sounds acceptable when it stands alone, making it problematic to compare anaphoric versions of this predicate. Unfortunately, a variety of stylistic preferences muddy the data in this section, as the differences in acceptability judgments by different authors indicate.) Fra;lkly, I have no simple explanation for examples such as (33) and (34), and neither do I find one in Sag and Hankamer’s analysis. The point I want to make about them is that the camp-VPE forms


that cannot be pragmatically controlled do not stand as counterexamples unless their null complement counterparts can take antecedents from the discourse model. These two forms seem to have similar recoverability characteristics, and I have argued that they have similar patterns of acceptability.

Sluicing. Sluicing is a form of surface anaphora that leaves a stranded wh

word.

(35) Someone drank all my beer but I don’t know who. (36) ?A11 my beer was drunk by someone, but I don’t know who.

As (36) shows, it prefers a logically consistent antecedent, and as the following example shows, it generally cannot be pragmatically controlled.s

(37) (A child is found near a broken vase, and says:) *I don’t know who.

Here, the missing material is the clause that follows the interrogative. Unlike

null complement anaphora, the main clause of a sluiced sentence does not syntactically restrict the subject, object or other roles of the ellipted clause. For example, a sentence like Ifound out why does not restrict the subject to be Z, nor does it give any syntactic clues to what the missing verb, object(s) or

prepositional phrases might be. Thus, this form is missing the whole clause, and the clues provided are only

the pragmatic ones given in the matrix clause. Although in some cases these may be considerable, in most they seem not to be: Z don’t know why, Show me

how, Did you hear when? provide minimal contexts. The first example could have literally any sentence as an antecedent; the second restricts the verb to an action clause (though Show me how you felt is conceivable); and the third is restricted only to any event or state that occurs in a specified time.

Sluicing may be compared to null complement anaphora, which is also lacking a surface clause but is a deep form. I have already pointed out that null complement anaphora specifies the subject of the ellipted clause, whereas this form does not. Another difference is in the main verbs that allow the two cases. For example, the following verbs can take null complement anaphora

but do not allow sluicing: want, refuse, let, comply, agfee, promise and succeed. The verbs that do allow sluicing are generally ‘verbs of inert perception and cognition’, which usually take that or wh clauses (Quirk et al. (1972: 96)). There seems to be a semantic as well as a syntactic difference between these

5 Sluicing seems less constrained here than many of the other surface forms: 1 have observed

numerous violations of the consistency constraint in conversations and in film and television dialogues. I retain the general conclusion that sluicing takes linguistic control because of examples like (37) for which other anaphors are possible (e.g., I didn’t do it). However, sluicing is clearly

higher on the recoverability scale than VPE or stripping, which may explain why it is more liberal in its acceptance of antecedents than these forms.

802 G.L. Murphy / Deep and w-face anuphoru

groups of verbs, because almost any proposition can be the object of these cognitive verbs. That is, the missing complements of He won’t allow you, I

promise, and They succeeded seem more restricted by the pragmatics of the anaphoric sentence than the missing complements of I don’t know why, I

wonder who, etc., since almost anything can be known or wondered, but fewer things promised or succeeded in. Thus, the recoverability explanation can account for why these two forms are in different classes.

Stripping. “Stripping is a rule that deletes everything in a clause under

identity with corresponding parts of a preceding clause, except for one constituent (and sometimes a clause-initial adverb or negative)” (Hankamer and Sag (1976: 409)). As one might expect from this description, stripping is a surface anaphor. It is not easily controlled pragmatically, as Hankamer and Sag showed with this comparison:

(38) Listen Ivan, he’s playing the William Tell Overture on the recorder. Yeah, but not very well.

(39) (Someone starts to play the William Tell Overture on the recorder.) *Yeah, but not very well.

The consistency criterion is difficult to test here, because the anaphoric clause includes no verb or subject and usually no object, and so almost any previous clause would be consistent with it.

This form provides hardly any clues to pick out the correct antecedent: there is no verb or subject and usually no object to provide clues, so that the one adjective or adverb phrase remaining is the only clue. This is a more meager clue than the clue of any of the deep forms considered. The missing material is a whole clause. Thus, this form requires a lot to be recovered from a minimal clue, which is consistent with its being a surface anaphor.

Gapping. Gapping occurs when a verb and its auxiliaries are deleted, but the subject and object are preserved. Sag’s (1979) example is:

(40) Erlichman duped Haldeman, and Nixon Mitchell.6

The missing information is the predicate connecting the subject and object, which is not very much to recover. However, the anaphoric clause supplies little or no information. For example, suppose that I had just viewed a scene with a number of Nixon aides and that someone whispered to me and Nixon Mitchell too, referring to this scene. To interpret this, I would have to decide which of the aides bore a relation that could be predicated of Nixon and Mitchell. However, neither these people nor that relation is included in the

6 The misspelling Erlichmann for Ehrlichmann, is taken over from the original article by Sag

(1979). (Editors’ note.)


gapped clause. In short, to mterpret these anaphors, the listener must find a

whole subject-verb-object relation in order to supply the missing predicate. An added difficulty is that the assignment of subject and object in the

antecedent is crucial here: even if the listener deduces that and Nixon Mitchell

depends on the relation between Haldeman and Erlichman, the interpretation critically depends on whether this relation has been encoded and remembered as Haldeman duped Erlichman or as Erlichman believed Haldeman. Thus, the listener must retrieve not only the relation connecting the antecedent object and subject, but. also some aspects of the exact form in which the relation was originally expressed. Clearly, this would be difficult without a linguistic antecedent. The other forms considered here do not seem to have this characteris- tic. For example, Nixon did it to Mitchell specifies an action with Nixon as the agent and Mitchell as the recipient.

A potentially equally serious problem is that two nouns are rarely adjacent in the same clause in English, except as a compound or conjoint NP, but Nixon

Mitchell is neither of these, so the gapped clause may be misparsed. (The main exception, of course, is when direct and indirect objects are adjacent in the VP, which also does not describe these gapped NPs.) For example, (40) might be misunderstood (at least at first) as Erlichman duped Haldeman, Nixon and

Mitchell. Blumenthal ((1966) see also Frazier and Fodor (1978)) supports the idea that consecutive NPs are difficult to parse, in his experiments on center- embedded sentences, like (41).

(41) The dog the cat the horse chased bit was brown.

Blumenthal argued that the subjects of the clauses in (41) are interpreted as one compound NP, which interferes with the correct parsing. In isolation, it would be difficult to understand Nixon Mitchell as a sentence at all, which is probably a powerful reason why it cannot be pragmatically controlled.

Although this factor is not part of recovering antecedents (i.e., not specific to interpreting anaphora), it is consistent with the theme that understanding difficulty has determined which anaphors can be pragmatically controlled.

How do gapping’s recoverability characteristics compare to those of the other forms? It is more like VPE than like do it anaphora, since any predicate (not simply discrete, intentional acts) is allowed as an antecedent. Furthermore, only gapping seems to require literal information about the antecedent in order to be correctly interpreted. The poor clue provided by the anaphoric form and the lack of any verb (which makes Nixon Mitchell sound like a list rather than a sentence) make it seem reasonable for this to be a surface form.

So anaphora. This is a very complex type, which includes a number of separable forms: Halliday and Hasan (1976) discuss six different versions, two of which are involved in nominal anaphora. The three forms I will discuss here

804 G.L. Murphy / Deep and swface anuphora

are do so anaphora; the form where so replaces a verb complement, as in believe so, say so, etc. ; and so as a clausal replacement.

Do so anaphora is the main type of interest here, because it is essentially a type of VPE, with so explicitly marking the ellipsis:

(42) Lee raised a hand, and I did so too. (43) Copy this picture, and let me know when you’ve done so.

The recoverability characteristics of I did so too seem identical to I did too (VPE), since the so does not provide any information about the antecedent. Therefore, recoverability considerations suggest that do so is a surface anaphor, and so it is:

(44) (Fran attempts to throw a soda can into the garbage, but misses time after time.) Chris: *I don’t think you can do so.

(45a) *I want this can in the garbage, but I don’t think I can do so. (45b) I want this can in the garbage, but I don’t think I can do it.

Quirk et al. (1972: 691) show that do so can take six of their seven verb types as an antecedent, with one of those being only partly acceptable. Remember, however, that the deep form, do it anaphora, can only take two of the seven as antecedents. Thus, do so has more possible antecedents than the deep form (though less than VPE, which takes all verb types as antecedents). In short, the recoverability explanation is consistent with the categorization of do so anaphora as a surface form. For example, Kempson (1977) used this example in an unrelated discussion:

(46) Johnny saw her duck, and Will did so too.

She suggested that did so could mean saw her duck. However, this antecedent is not possible for do it, since it doesn’t specify an intentional act:

(47) *Johnny saw her duck, and Will did it too. (did it = saw her duck)

In short, do it anaphora has a smaller range of possible antecedents ~ it is less ambiguous than this form of so anaphora.

The form in which so acts as a replacement of a complement clause occurs with verbs like tell, say, think, know, fear (is afraid), reckon, seem, etc., which may have some epistemic component in common (Halliday and Hasan (1976: 130ff.) provide a possible account).

G.L. Murphy i Deep and surface anaphora 805

(48) Kim is crazy, you know. I’ve always said so.

(49) Lee can’t get a hit with men on base. Think so? Yep, I’m afraid so.

In these examples, a whole clause is missing (more than for do so). The information provided is slim: so itself provides no clue to the exact antecedent, and most of the main verbs only minimally restrict the possible antecedents. Z think so or Z said so restrict the antecedents to the set of propositions that can be thought or said, which is hardly a restriction; It seems so has no restrictions at all. Thus, this form must be very low on the recoverability scale.

The form in which so replaces a clause without being a verb complement is exemplified by the following:

(50) You’re acting like a jerk. Perhaps so, but for a good reason.

(51) Fran’s a crook. If so, we’d better lock up the silver.

Clearly, the information provided by the anaphoric clause (e.g., Zf so) is no help in finding the antecedent; a full clause must be recovered. The sentence’s other clause will exert some pragmatic control over the choice of the anaphor, but this will vary wildly with the particular clause ~ e.g., (50) above seems to provide no clue, but (51) is better. In neither case does’ the following clause specify the missing subject, as it does in null complement anaphora. Also, Perhaps so and Possibly so can stand alone, in which case there is essentially no pragmatic control from the anaphoric sentence. In any case, there is no restriction on the type of missing predicate or clausal structure, and so this form is somewhat similar to sluicing. The recoverability explanation correctly predicts it to be a surface anaphor.

General restrictions on so anaphora. In addition to the recovery ex-

planation, there is another factor that prevents so anaphora from being pragmatically controlled, arising from the meaning of so. As Hankamer and Sag pointed out (1976: 415416) so in so-dux constructions (e.g., so do I) indicates that the same thing is being predicated as was predicated earlier. Halliday and Hasan (1976: 138) note that so in nominal anaphora means ‘like this’ or ‘to this extent’. Perhaps, then, so is essentially an indexical, meaning ‘as indicated’. Dictionaries have such entries as their first meaning, sometimes including an indexical this as in Halliday and Hasan’s definition. This would explain the interpretations of the anaphoric expressions:

806 G.L. Murphy / Deep and surface anaphoru

(52a) Perhaps so = Perhaps it is like this. (52b) I don’t believe so = I don’t believe it is as (someone) indicated. (52~) After you’ve done so. . = After you’ve done as I have indicated... (52d) Have you ever seen anything go so fast? = Have you ever seen anything

go as fast as this?

It makes sense for someone to say I don’t believe it! after viewing a surprising event, but it makes no sense to say I don’t believe so! because no one has ‘indicated’ the event. By actually stating a fact, one is ‘indicating’ it, thereby allowing it to be the antecedent of SO anaphora. Thus, there may be semantic factors that prevent so from referring to any arbitrary event or state in the context, in addition to the recoverability factors.

Conjunction reduction. Conjunction reduction occurs when a constituent in a coordinated phrase or clause is omitted in half of the conjunction: Ben in (53) and Sandy is in (54).

(53) Ben wrote his thesis and (54) Sandy is running to the store and

went home. hoping for a miracle.

Hankamer and Sag (1976) originally treated this form as a case of gapping, and Sag (1979) listed it separately. Both sources list it as a form of surface anaphora.

There is a confounding factor that makes it difficult to evaluate the ability of conjunction reduction to be pragmatically controlled. Since conjunction reduction is the ellipsis of repeated information in a coordinated constituent, when there is no coordinated constituent - and therefore no linguistic antecedent - the anaphoric sentence no longer involves conjunction reduction. In other words, conjunction reduction requires a linguistic antecedent by deli- nition; examples like (55) are best described as null pronouns rather than pragmatically controlled conjunction reduction (of example (53)).

(55) *And went home.

In short, conjunction reduction must have a linguistic antecedent by definition, regardless of its recoverability or processing characteristics.’

’ Another source of difficulty in analyzing conjunction reduction is the variety of forms that may

be reduced in this way: subject or object NPs, heads of NPs, auxiliary verbs, VPs, VPs minus their auxiliaries, subjects and auxiliaries, adverbial phrases and others. These different constructions could have quite different recoverability patterns (compare, for example, ellipsis of an auxiliary to ellipsis of a whole VP). Finally, some of these ‘reductions’ may not be elliptical at all, but rather

reflect a compounding of some sort. For example, (53) could be analyzed as having a compound VP, rrrote his rhesis and went home, rather than as two VPs with one subject ellipted. If this is true,

then none of the analyses of anaphora may apply. See Gazdar, Pullum, Sag and Wasow (1982) for


5. Overall comparison

Now that each form has been discussed, it is possible to ask whether any overall pattern arises from the analysis. Table 3 summarizes the recoverability characteristics of the forms, and although it is only a partial summary of the analysis, it reveals some observable patterns. The clearest regularity is that any form requiring a whole clause to be recovered is surface anaphora; all the deep anaphors take smaller constituents. (A possible exception is sentential it, which is discussed later.) Another striking pattern, not completely independent of the first, is that nominal forms (pronouns and perhaps do it anaphora) are all deep.

Table 3 Overview of recoverability differences.

Form Class Lineuistic recoverv clue Possible antecedents

Personal pronoun Deep

One Sentential if

Do if anaphora

Null complement

anaphora Verb-Phrase

ellipsis; do so Sluicing

Stripping

Gapping

So as a complement

renlacement

Deep

Deep Deep

Deep

Surface

Surface

Surface

Surface

Surface

Gender, number of pronoun;

clues from the sentence

Number; clues from the sentence

Clues from the sentence

Sentence subject; any PPs

Matrix clause; subject of

complement clause Sentence subject; any PPs

Matrix clause

One constituent (usually a PP)

Sentence subject and object

Matrix clause

Person(s) or thing(s)

Person(s) or things(s) A proposition

An intentional, discrete act

A predicate

A predicate

A clause

A clause A predicate relation

A clause

These patterns are consistent with the recoverability explanation. The first one, that any form that requires recovery of a whole clause is surface, simply reflects the fact that recovering a clause allows much greater room for error than recovering one component of a clause (e.g., a predicate or NP). The summary suggests that clauses are too difficult to recover solely on the basis of pragmatic constraints, and so can be ellipted only when there is a linguistic antecedent.

The second pattern, that nominal forms tend to be deep anaphors, may be explained by Gentner’s (1982) analysis of the differences between nouns and verbs. She shows that children’s first words are overwhelmingly nouns and that

a more complete review of the recent issues involving coordination. Given these considerations, a

more complete account of conjunction is needed before any clear analysis of ‘conjunction

reduction’ can be given-whether based on recoverability or another explanation

808 G.L. Murphy / Deep and myface anaphora

languages differ in lexical coding for verbs more than they do for nouns. Gentner’s explanation is that nouns generally refer to objects whose identities are well defined, whereas verbs can refer to events with fuzzy boundaries. Thus, her analysis suggests that people should be able to pick out a ‘missing’ object (i.e., the referent of a pronoun) more easily than they could pick out the correct ‘missing’ predicate (i.e., referent of a pro-verb or ellipsis). We can add to this point the fact that in any context there are more possible relations

between objects (i.e., predicates) than there are objects. Thus, picking out a nominal referent should be easier.

This argument might be clarified with a specific example. Imagine that I am turning fried eggs at the stove and that someone says Don’t do that (which I will assume is a variant of do it anaphora). Is it the whole turning activity that I am not supposed to do? Or is it that I shouldn’t turn them so roughly, shouldn’t turn the particular egg I’m turning, or shouldn’t turn eggs in my good shirt? It is unclear which action of mine or what aspect of those actions is the referent of do that. Compare this with Don’t turn that. Even without seeing the speaker point, I can easily reduce the possible referents of that to one or two eggs. Since even fried eggs have relatively clear boundaries, and no single attribute of theirs is being referred to, the referent can be picked out quite easily. In short, the difference between recovering nominal and predicate anaphors seems solidly based on differences between nominal and predicate concepts in general (Gentner (1982)).

6. Evaluation of the recoverability explanation

How well have the differences in recoverability explained the deep/surface distinction? Certainly there seems to be a positive correlation between recoverability and ‘deepness’ of the anaphoric form. The forms with the most restricted sets of possible antecedents (personal pronouns, do it anaphora) are deep; those with the least restricted sets (stripping, clausal so anaphora) are surface. Furthermore, forms that preserve more information to help recover the antecedent tend to be deep. Neither of these factors alone seems to explain all the differences. There are forms that accept the same antecedents, but are in different classes because of their recovery clues and forms that provide the same recovery clue but that differ because of their possible antecedents. When an anaphoric form seemed to be in the middle of the recoverability scale, comparisons of two forms (e.g., sluicing vs. null complement anaphora) seemed consistent with the recoverability explanation.

Even after considering the individual comparisons presented above, one might not accept the functional explanation of the deep/surface distinction. In particular, one might argue that recoverability always depends on context: in some cases, a surface anaphor could be made easy to recover, and in others, a


deep anaphor could be made quite ambiguous. Certainly this is true, SO what is the point of the individual comparisons and the entries in table 3? The point was not to propose universal descriptions of each form’s use, since there is probably no such description. The point of the analyses was to find the limits of the ambiguity of each form. Some forms seems to prevent ambiguity by their very nature; others permit it or even encourage it. The functional argument is that any form that permits ambiguity in recovering the antecedent may be grammatically restricted to prevent such ambiguity. However, the argument does not presuppose that speakers would normally be vague or ambiguous, but simply that the grammatical rule lessens the chance of this happening by codifying restrictions on the use of some anaphors. One way of viewing this restriction is as a means of limiting the number of conscious decisions the speaker must make; where the grammar eliminates ambiguity, the speaker need not worry about avoiding it.

In the course of this discussion, I sometimes invoked particular characteristics of a form that influenced its ability to be pragmatically controlled, for example, the meaning of the word so and the difficulty of parsing gapped NPs. These arguments were not generated directly from the recoverability explanation, but they are consistent with the notion that anaphoric forms differ in how easily they can be parsed and understood and that these differences are related to which class they fall into. Also, as Bates and MacWhinney (1982) and Bates, McNew, MacWhinney, Devescovi and Smith (1982) have empha- sized, any grammatical rule is determined by a number of competing psychological and historical factors. 1 have only concentrated on one here, but other principles (such as those just mentioned) are no doubt operating as well.

There is one fairly clear violation of the recoverability explanation that must be explained by other considerations, namely sentential it anaphora. Sentences like:

(56a) It bothered him. (56b) I don’t believe it! (56~) It’s not easy.

give very little clue to the antecedent, which could be any state or event (subject to the pragmatics of the utterance). Furthermore, (56a) and (56b) are ambiguous between sentential it and the personal pronoun it, making it even more difficult to find the antecedent. The recoverability explanation seems to predict that this should be a surface form, but it isn’t. What competing factors might be operating here to violate the recoverability prediction?

The main reason for sentential it to be a deep form is probably that all definite descriptions are (including the other pronouns) - as predicted by recoverability. (In fact, this property of definite descriptions is necessary to allow reference to a wide variety of discourse entities whether or not they


were linguistically introduced in a coherent constituent.) Furthermore, non- sentential uses of it are fully in keeping with the recoverability explanation. It is probably more efficient to keep one rule for all definite descriptions than to create an exception, especially since the exception would be difficult to specify. That is, the distinction between the it that refers to a sentence and the it that refers to a thought, feeling or event described by an NP is very fuzzy:

(57a) Adam worried that his fish was hungry, but he told himself to forget it. (57b) Adam was obsessed with the worry that his fish was hungry, but he told

himself to forget it. (58a) Eve still believed that she would get an A, but it was only a fantasy. (58b) Eve still held the belief that she would get an A, but it was only a

fantasy.

In the (b) examples, it has an actual NP as an antecedent (e.g., the worry that

his fish was hungry) but in the (a) examples, the referent is not a nominal constituent (see also Webber (1979)). Distinguishing between the sentential and NP antecedents in such examples would be difficult, and it is impossible to tell from the anaphoric clause alone whether it refers to a previous sentence, an NP, or some proposition not contained in any constituent. Thus, any rule separating sentential it from the other uses of it would be quite complex, which may be why both are deep anaphors. Presumably, speakers simply rely on general pragmatic principles to ensure that sentential it can be understood. One consequence of this is that sentential it is more ambiguous than other pronouns. This prediction could be empirically tested in on-line comprehension studies if similar enough contrasts could be constructed.

Earlier I raised the question of how one would ‘predict’ whether a new anaphoric form were surface or deep. For a new English form, we could just compare it to known surface and deep forms and make a relative prediction based on its recoverability characteristics. One could even make cross-linguistic predictions by comparing the set of possible antecedents and the clue provided by the anaphoric sentence of a non-English anaphor to those of English forms. For example, an anaphor that needs to recover a predicate (unrestricted) and that provides only the sentence subject would be expected to be a surface form, since it is similar to the English VPE.

Another method to predict the classification of new forms would be to use the two patterns observed earlier in table 3. That is, any anaphor missing a whole clause should be a surface form, and any nominal form should be deep. Forms that do not fit either of these descriptions must be compared to other forms that have already been classified.

G.L. Murphy / Deep and surface anaphora 81 I

7. Is the deep/surface distinction linguistic or psychological?

I have argued in this article that the deep/surface distinction could arise from a difference in the recoverability of the antecedents of the two forms. Another interpretation of the evidence I have reviewed is that there is no linguistic distinction between surface and deep forms, only a general (psychological) requirement that speakers must make it easy for listeners to recover the antecedent. The anaphors identified as ‘surface’ are simply the forms that usually require a very unambiguous antecedent, and the ‘deep’ forms are those that do not. On this view, there is no need to posit two linguistic classes. This explanation has been proposed by Schachter (1977) with regard to propredicates and was rebutted by Hankamer (1978). Rather than review this debate here, I will only point out that identifying grammaticality with comprehensibility is not successful.

(59) *The garbage needed to be taken out, so Sandy did.

Example (59) is not incomprehensible or ambiguous - in fact there is only one plausible interpretation for the anaphor - yet it is judged unacceptable. The arguments I have given did not show that every example of pragmatically controlled surface anaphora is uninterpretable, but rather that many cases would be ambiguous or hard to understand if a linguistic antecedent were not available. Because of this fact, I argued that a linguistic rule has evolved that prevents the production of sentences like (59). Schachter cannot explain why hard-to-understand cases of deep anaphora are acceptable, or why easy-to- understand cases like (59) are unacceptable. Given (1979) has also argued against the replacement of syntactic rules with psychologically-based discourse rules, in favor of functional analyses such as the one I have presented.

Furthermore, acceptability judgments for these anaphoric sentences do not always predict how difficult they are to understand (Murphy (1982, 1985)).

The explanation proposed here uses aspects of both Schachter’s and Han- kamer and Sag’s proposals: rather than ignoring the pragmatic difference (as Sag and Hankamer (1984) do) or slighting the grammatical distinction (as Schachter (1977) does), the recoverability explanation uses the first to explain the second. Thus, although the deep/surface distinction seems to be a syntactic one, it may well be explained by differences in comprehension.


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