Collaborative Research: Typology and Theory of Anaphora

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Despite significant superficial differences important to human social organization, human faces or bodies are fundamentally structured in the same way, and their structures reflect a unique, biologically based, blueprint. Similarly, human languages are superficially vastly dissimilar in ways important to social organization, but it is not known if and to what extent their structures reflect a unique blueprint, nor is it known - if there is one - whether it is unique to language or reflects cognitively more general capacities. The present project explores these questions of universality in the central domain of reference, as a first step towards settling the question of the linguistic specificity of the relevant cognitive principles involved. Investigating reference means asking how entities in the world are picked out by linguistic expressions. More precisely, this project concentrates on the referential import of anaphors, which are expressions such as English "himself" seemingly present in all languages, and whose referential function must rely on another expression or a discourse prominent entity. The project aims to develop precise tools and tests to document in depth, analyze and explain the empirical patterns displayed by anaphors, which are of interest to linguistic theory, typology and beyond. This investigation will initially be carried out in a set of typologically diverse languages. The gathered data, whose organization will be informed by the analytical tools used and the conclusions reached, will enrich the open access crowd-sourced SSWL (Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages) database, and should provide a sound basis not only for further development of linguistic theories, but also for philosophical, psycholinguistic, neuropsychological and computational approaches of reference, and even - given the sensitivity of anaphors to explicit or implicit points of view of discourse participants - for literary analysis and translation.