Discourse anaphora – Theoretical perspectives

International audienceThe sign language modality provides unique advantages to the study of pronouns and discourse anaphora. The study of pronouns and anaphora has been integral to the study of formal semantics, giving a variety of insights into the logic underlying natural language. In the values that they can take, pronouns reveal the primitive semantic objects that natural language can make reference to. The sign language modality provides unique advantages to the study of pronouns and discourse anaphora. A precondition for using sign language data to bear on theories of pronouns for spoken language – or vice versa – is establishing that pronouns in sign language and pronouns in spoken language are indeed part of the same abstract pronominal system. Syntactically, pronouns in spoken language are characterized by a range of constraints on distribution and co-reference. The Binding Theory conditions, crossover effects, and resumptive uses for island extraction