Parameters of antecedent – possessive postcopular anaphor correlation: the case of definiteness effect

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Abstract

The paper aims at finding correlation between possessive postcopular anaphor in English existential there-sentences and its antecedent. English there-sentences provide a site for the phenomenon known as definiteness effect, one of the most controversial and still not fully resolved issues in linguistics today. The current state of this problem determines the relevance of this article. The subject of the study is the relationship of possessive post-сopular noun phrases and their antecedents. So, the features of the definiteness effect are studied in terms of anaphor - antecedent distance. The purpose of the work is to establish some possible patterns of mutual arrangement of these units. The corresponding tasks are the following: collecting data that satisfy the input conditions; identifying the antecedents of a possessive anaphor; establishing the distance between the anaphor and the antecedent. The British National Corpus is the source for the research material. The novelty of the study lies in the very formulation of the problem, which has not been previously raised in the scientific literature, as well as in the results obtained. The findings are the following: the authors have identified certain types of antecedents united in enlarged groups, namely, explicitly expressed antecedents and antecedents without verbal embodiment. The detected distance between antecedents and their possessive anaphors is fixed as minimal, within the framework of neighbouring sentences, in some cases tending to zero value. A correlation is found between the type of antecedent, its location and distance from the possessive anaphor. The authors assume that such distance may serve as an additional licensing stipulation ensuring the admission of possessive noun phrases to the postcopular position of English existential sentences.

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