Underspecification and anaphora: Theoretical issues and preliminary evidence. Discourse Processes: a multidisciplinary journal

Much experimental work in psycholinguistics suggests that fully specified syntactic and semantic interpretations are obtained incrementally. The finding that intepreta-tion takes place incrementally is very robust and underlies our own view of sentence processing as well; however, most of this work tends to test very simple interpre-tive judgments, and using materials which have very clean-cut interpretations, which makes the view expressed above more questionable when applied to semantic inter-pretation. This article discusses a class of anaphoric expressions that do not appear to have a clear antecedent, referring to data from both corpus analysis and psycholin-guistic experiments. We argue that these cases of anaphora are similar to cases of lexical polysemy, and propose an explicit semantic representation for such cases. There is very strong evidence that most language interpretation processes take place quickly and incrementally (Marslen-Wilson, 1975; Swinney, 1979; Frazier, 1987; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). Most such pa-pers also suggest that the interpretation thus derived is fully disambiguated; how-ever, this further conclusion tends to be based on very simplified views abou