Abstract

It is argued that most anaphors have semantic content and that the semantic content of a given anaphoric atom plays an active role in determining both its distribution and the interpretation of the sentences in which it is employed. It is first demonstrated that semantic distinctions between semantically relational anaphoric atoms predict differences between their distributions. It is then argued that all of the semantically relational anaphoric atoms respect Principle A, while semantically contentless anaphors often do not.