Anaphora and Language Design

Pronouns and anaphors (including reflexives such as himself and herself) may or mustdepend on antecedents for their interpretation. These dependencies are subject to conditions thatprima facie show substantial crosslinguistic variation. In this monograph, Eric Reuland presents atheory of how these anaphoric dependencies are represented in natural language in a way that doesjustice to the the variation one finds across languages. He explains the conditions on thesedependencies in terms of elementary properties of the computational system of natural language. Heshows that the encoding of anaphoric dependencies makes use of components of the language systemthat all reflect different cognitive capacities; thus the empirical research he reports on offersinsights into the design of the language system. Reuland's account reduces the conditions on bindingto independent properties of the grammar, none of which is specific to binding. He offers aprincipled account of the roles of the lexicon, syntax, semantics, and the discourse component inthe encoding of anaphoric dependencies; a window into the overall organization of the grammar andthe roles of linguistic and extralinguistic factors; a new typology of anaphoric expressions; a viewof crosslinguistic variation (examining facts in a range of languages, from English, Dutch, Frisian,German, and Scandinavian languages to Fijian, Georgian, and Malayalam) that shows unity indiversity.