Underspecification and anaphora: Theoretical issues and preliminary evidence

Much experimental work in psycholinguisties suggests that fully specified syntactic and semantic interpretations are obtained incrementally. The finding that interpretation takes place incrementally is very robust and underlies our own view of sentence processing as well; however, most of this work tends to test very simple interpretive judgments using materials that have clean-cut interpretations, which makes the earlier-expressed view more questionable when applied to semantic interpretation. This article discusses a class of anaphoric expressions that do not appear to have a clear antecedent, referring to data from both corpus analysis and psycholinguistic experiments. We argue that these cases of anaphora are similar to cases of lexical polysemy and propose an explicit semantic representation for such cases.