I hear the patter of little feet around the house, I expect Bruce. What I expect is a cat, a particular cat. If I heard such a patter in another house, I might expect a cat but no particular cat. What I expect then seems to be a Meinongian incomplete cat. I expect winter, expect stormy weather, expect to shovel snow, expect fatigue---a season, a phenomenon, an activity, a state. I expect that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. (...) This time what I expect is a state of affairs. If we let surface grammar be our guide, the objects of expectation seem quite a miscellany. The same goes for belief, since expectation is one kind of belief. The same goes for desire: I could want Bruce, want a cat but no particular cat, want winter, want stormy weather, want to shovel snow, want fatigue, or want that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. The same goes for other attitudes to the extent that they consist partly of beliefs or desires or lacks thereof. But the seeming diversity of objects might be an illusion. Perhaps the objects of attitudes are uniform in category, and it is our ways of speaking elliptically about these uniform objects that are diverse. That indeed is our consensus. We mostly think that the attitudes uniformly have propositions as their objects. That is why we speak habitually of "propositional attitudes.". (shrink)

This paper argues that donkey pronouns should be construed as definite articles, followed by an NP sister which has undergone deletion in the phonology. So Every man who owns a donkey beats it is claimed to share a Logical Form with Every man who owns a donkey beats the donkey, which means the same. There is independent evidence for assimilating pronouns to determiners, and for NP-deletion; so this theory explains E-type anaphora without postulating any special entity (`E-type pronoun') for the (...) purpose. Since NP-deletion, like other ellipsis, requires an antecedent, this theory also explains the requirement for a "formal link" between donkey pronoun and antecedent, which standard E-type theories find difficult to account for. Other empirical advantages of this theory include its ability to explain the pattern of strict and sloppy identity displayed by donkey sentences with phonologically reduced continuations. It is shown that Bach-Peters sentences, quantificational subordination, and paycheck sentences can also be dealt with on the present approach. (shrink)

A more extensive discussion of certain of the more technical notions appears in my paper "On Binding" (Chomsky,; henceforth, OB). ...

One of the most important discoveries of the last thirty years is the extent to which the pattern of anaphoric interpretations is determined by the geometry of syntactic structure. As our understanding of these phenomena has steadily grown, the theory of syntax has often been driven by discoveries in this domain, and it is no accident that Chomsky's Binding Theory was a centerpiece of the principles and parameters approach of the 1980s. However, what remained accidental in Chomsky's theory, and in (...) most of the theories that have followed it, is the apparently complementary distribution of forms that support anaphora for a given antecedent. This book argues not only that the complementary distribution in question is robust empirically, but that its existence is derived by a competitive theory of anaphora. It is demonstrated in detail that the competitive theory provides a far better explanation of anti-locality, anti-subject orientation and the range of apparently exceptional distributions that have been long been problematic for other approaches, such as Chomsky's Binding Theory and the influential predication-based theory of Reinhart and Reuland. (shrink)

Broadly construed, anaphors are forms that must be anteceded in a discourse, and more narrowly, as syntacticians tend to use the term, anaphors are forms that must be anteceded within a bounded, syntactically defined domain. In this short note, I focus on the difference between these two notions of anaphor and some problems with approaches to anaphora that try to collapse them by linking all anaphors to their antecedents by syntactic operations. The latter approach permits syntactic operations to exceed the (...) bounds of sentence grammar and must still introduce familiar descriptive constraints to distinguish between anaphora in the general sense, on the one hand, and syntactic anaphors, on the other. The notion of syntactic anaphor most familiar to syntacticians is the class of forms that are susceptible to Principle A (1a) of Chomsky's (1981) Binding Theory.. (shrink)