UC Santa Cruz

This thesis investigates three of the ways causality influences the resolution of reflexives in VP-ellipsis to either a strict or sloppy interpretation. It looks at structural factors (position of the elided clause relative to the antecedent clause), discourse relations (parallelism versus cause-effect), and lexical influences (implicit causality). It examines competing theories for the observed bias in strict vs. sloppy readings in pairs of sentences like `John blamed himself and/because Bill did too' and argues that discourse relations and lexical items prove the strongest predictors of the bias.