Nominal VP anaphora in Scandinavian and English

Abstract

This paper investigates the properties of nominal phrases and demonstratives used as verbal anaphora in Norwegian, Danish, English, and Scots-English, e.g. English Can John make good curry? – That he can; Norwegian Anja ligger godt an, det samme gjør Madelène lit. ‘Anja is in a good position, Madelène does the same [thing]’. Following Lødrup (Proceedings of NELS 24, 1994), Houser et al. (Proceedings of WECOL 34, 2007), Bentzen et al. (J Comp Ger Linguist 16:91–125, 2013), these anaphoric expressions are argued to be surface anaphora and to conceal elided vPs. Contrary to previous analyses, the nominal phrases are argued to themselves be contributing meaning beyond the vPs they conceal; they are argued to be overt background arguments for an ellipsis-licensing head with semantics similar to Rooth’s ∼ operator (Nat Lang Semant 1(1):75–116, 1992). The paper also explores cross-linguistic variation in the discourse/antecedence conditions on such anaphora, and their fronting behavior. In Danish and (general) English, such anaphora must generally topicalize, whereas in Norwegian and Scots-English, they can more freely appear in situ (in post-auxiliary position). Developing Mikkelsen’s (J Linguist 51(3):595–643, 2015) analysis of Danish det, this behavior is encoded as a feature [uTop] which must be checked; Norwegian is argued to have more possibilities to check this feature in situ than Danish, while in Scots-English, that is argued to be a propositional anaphor, lacking the relevant feature.