Anaphora (linguistics) - Complement Anaphora

Complement Anaphora

In some special cases, an anaphora may refer not to its usual antecedent, but to its complement set. This phenomenon was first extensively studied in a series of psycholinguistic experiments, in the early 1990s.

In (1), the anaphoric pronoun 'they' refers to the children who are eating the ice-cream. Contrastingly, in (2), 'they' seems to refer to the children who are not eating ice-cream.

(1) Only a few of the children ate their ice-cream. They ate the strawberry flavour first.

(2) Only a few of the children ate their ice-cream. They threw it around the room instead.

The fact that sentences like (2) exist in the language seems at first odd: by definition, an anaphoric pronoun must refer to some noun that has already been introduced into the discourse. In complement anaphora cases, since the referent of the pronoun hasn't been formerly introduced, it is difficult to explain how something can refer to it. In the first sentence of (2), the set of ice-cream-eating-children is introduced into the discourse; but then the pronoun 'they' refers to the set of non-ice-cream-eating-children, a set which hasn't been priorly mentioned. One resolution of this problem is that 'they' refers to all the children, but the second sentence semantically excludes the children who ate ice cream, since children who ate their ice cream cannot throw it around the room.

Several accounts of this phenomenon are found in the literature, based on both semantic and pragmatic considerations. The most important point of debate is the question, whether the pronoun in (2) refers to the complement set (i.e. only to the set of non-ice-cream-eating-children), or to the maximal set (i.e. to all the children, while discounting the minority group). The answer to this question may have theoretical consequences regarding the question of the kind of information that the brain is able to access or calculate, and also pragmatical consequences regarding the way a theory of anaphora resolution should be devised.