IULC Publications

Comprehension and Production of Discourse Anaphora

By John Clibbens

John Clibbens' study investigates children's developing use of a range of anaphoric devices, including pronouns, nominal substitutes and zero anaphora, with a particular focus on their use in situations where they are not subject to the syntactic constraints of Binding Theory. After a general introduction and literature review, which includes a review of studies investigating children's knowledge of the principles of Binding Theory in order to delimit the scope of the present study, a number of empirical investigations are reported. These include experiments on the comprehension of pronouns and substitutes by children aged three to seven, a diary study of children's production of nominal substitutes from the age of eighteen months, and a large scale experimental study designed to investigate the production of pronouns, substitutes and zero anaphora by five and seven year old children and a comparison group of adult subjects. At the theoretical level, a distinction is drawn between 'text based' approaches, which concentrate on text as product: the 'words-on-the-page', and 'discourse-based' approaches, which address issues of processing and representation of discourse. Clibbens argues strongly that the latter approach is more likely to prove fruitful.

118 pages
$9.50

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