Abstract
This paper revisits some interesting asymmetry observed between that-clause and ‘so’ in English. Despite the fact that that-clauses embedded within an array of verb phrases can be pro-formed by ‘so’, the ones embedded within morphologically related noun phrases cannot. Moulton (2015) attempted to offer an account of this asymmetrical phenomenon by proposing that, contra standard assumptions, that-clauses embedded within those verb phrases are predicates rather than arguments in a parallel fashion to those embedded within derivationally related nouns. In other words, he argues that, based on derivational relatedness, the semantico-syntactic function of that-clause within a noun phrase can be extended to a verb phrase as well. We explore this issue by re-examining the syntactic distribution of ‘so’ and the semantic function of that-clause embedded within two distinct syntactic categories, a noun phrase and a verb phrase. We then propose that ‘so’ is a TP-substituting propositional anaphor. In so doing, we argue that there exist two types of CPs (cross-linguistically) and that these distinctions account for different syntactic behaviors of ‘so’ as a propositional anaphor in a variety of constructions.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 265-278 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics |
Volume | 22 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2022 |
Keywords
- anaphor
- argument
- predicate
- proposition
- so
- that-clause