Anaphora and Relevance

The presupposition that surface and deep anaphora involve different modes of anaphoric processing has been widely accepted. However, the question of why some examples of surface anaphora are pragmatically controlled and of what pragmatic factors determine the choice of either linguistic or nonlinguistic context have not yet been properly examined, except for ad hoc explanations. This paper deals with these problems by focusing on the assumptions the hearers use in utterance interpretation. In any case of anaphoric processing, both linguistic and nonlinguistic context can be used to recover antecedents. If linguistic context is available, antecedents can be recovered on the basis of syntactic clues. If not, antecedents are recovered in the assumption the hearers can access with least effort. Such an anaphoric processing is consistent with the principle of relevance proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995)