Referential Indices as Syntactic Features : Anaphoric Agreement in Gpsg

Abstract

This paper attempts to provide a GPSG account for anaphoric agreement in English, a phenomenon which used to be dealt with by pronominalization rules in classical transformational grammar. A new feature INDEX is proposed. It is a category-valued FOOT feature obeying the Foot Feature Principle. Grammatical agreement between pronouns and their antecedents is seen as a consequence of the distribution of the feature INDEX in local trees. The distribution is regulated by the interactions of the Foot Feature Principle and a slightly extended version of the Control Agreement Principle together with relevant Immediate Dominance Rules. Two particular assumptions need to be made for this account: direct (or indirect) objects control that-clause or when-clause complements and sentence-initial adverbial clauses are taken to be topicalized.