So Be It: The Discourse–Semantic Roles of So and It

Abstract

The aim of the article is to determine whether so and /' ( fulfil distinct discourse-building roles, in their predicate-and proposition-anaphoric guise. Is the choice between them determined by the syntactic or semantic nature of their 'antecedent', or of the context in which the choice between them is to be made? Or do they in fact themselves determine their 'antecedent' (or at least superimpose upon it a characteristically distinctive interpretation)? I shall argue for the latter analysis, indicating a range of factors (of a mainly semantic nature) which co-determine both the choice between these two anaphors, and their full utterance-level interpretation. A wide range of attested and constructed examples will be presented as the basis for the discussion.

Response particles as propositional anaphors

“…Such propositional discourse referents have been assumed by a number of authors, e.g. by Asher 1986, Cornish 1992, Geurts 1998and Frank 1996. For example, propositions can be taken up by pronouns, as in (17) Negative quantifiers behave like sentential negation, introducing a non-negated proposition.…”

Response particles as propositional anaphors

“…Such propositional discourse referents have been assumed by a number of authors, e.g. by Asher 1986, Cornish 1992, Geurts 1998and Frank 1996. For example, propositions can be taken up by pronouns, as in (17): The first clause introduces a propositional discourse referent d that is anchored to the proposition 'Ede stole the cookie'.…”

Ambiguity of Response Particles to Negative Utterances in Korean and English

“…Krifka (2013) proposes a discourse semantic account of the dual interpretations of RPs. He claims that i) the salient antecedent propositions introduce discourse referents (as Asher, 1986;Cornish, 1992;Geurts, 1998;Frank, 1996 also assumed existence of such propositional discourse referents) and that ii) RPs are anaphors that pick up these referents as the antecedents. In (5), the proposition in the sentence introduces a discourse referent d and it refers to d as the antecedent.…”