Toward a Functional Theory of Anaphora

Abstract

One of the most recalcitrant areas in generati ve-transformational grammar has been anaphora. It is mainly due to the fact that the theory of generative-transformational grammar has been strictly sentence-bound and constituent-structure·dependent whereas anaphora phenomena are typically discourse-oriented and characteristically dependent on communicative fun ctions rather than constituent structures. Recently linguists like Kuno (1975) and Bolinger (1977) have proposed a discourse-oriented functional approach to anaphora. This paper is to contribute to their attempts by proposing six additional hypotheses for the functional approach to anaphora.