Abstract
The paper represents a contribution to the study of anaphora linked to linguistic structures denoting events, facts or propositions. These anaphors are called abstract anaphors. Abstract anaphors are studied in sentential structures with appositive relative clauses in Romanian. Three abstract anaphors may occur in such sentences: care (‘which’), unde (‘where’) and ceea ce (‘which’). It is shown that care (‘which’) is used to denote events and facts (but not propositions); unde (‘where’) may only be used to denote facts, whereas ceea ce (‘which’) denotes facts propositions and outcomes but not events. The analysis therefore documents the existence of finer-grained realizations of abstract anaphora in natural language. At the same time, the analysis enriches the inventory of lexical items which count as a diagnostic for phrases that denote events, facts or intensional objects.
I am deeply grateful to Ana-Maria Barbu and Gianina Iordăchioaia, who made substantive and valuable suggestions and comments on previous versions of this paper. My gratitude also goes to the three anonymous reviewers of the DAAR Colloquium in Faro, Portugal. Finally, I am indebted to Bogdan Ştefănescu for his assistance in improving the English of the paper. I take exclusive credit for any possible errors in this article.
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Ionescu, E. (2011). Abstract Anaphors in Appositive Relative Clauses in Romanian. In: Hendrickx, I., Lalitha Devi, S., Branco, A., Mitkov, R. (eds) Anaphora Processing and Applications. DAARC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7099. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25917-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25917-3_7
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