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Anaphoric one and its Implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

John Payne ,
Geoffrey K. Pullum ,
Barbara C. Scholz  and
Eva Berlage
John Payne*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Geoffrey K. Pullum*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Barbara C. Scholz
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Eva Berlage*
Affiliation:
University of Hamburg
*
john.payne@manchester.ac.uk
gpullum@ling.ed.ac.uk
eva.berlage@uni-hamburg.de
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Extract

The nominal anaphoric element one has figured prominently in discussions of linguistic nativism because of an important argument advanced by C. L. Baker (1978). His argument has been frequently cited within the cognitive and linguistic sciences, and has provided the topic for a chain of experimental and computational psycholinguistics papers. Baker's crucial grammaticality facts, though much repeated in the literature, have not been critically investigated. A corpus investigation shows that his claims are not true: one does not take only phrasal antecedents, but can also take nouns on their own, including semantically relational nouns, and can take various of-PP dependents of its own. We give a semantic analysis of anaphoric one that allows it to exhibit this kind of freedom, and we exhibit frequency evidence that goes a long way toward explaining why linguists have been inclined to regard phrases like the one of physics or three ones as ungrammatical when in fact (as corpus evidence shows) they are merely dispreferred relative to available grammatical alternatives. The main implication for the acquisition literature is that one of the most celebrated arguments from poverty of the stimulus is shown to be without force.

Keywords

complement-modifier distinctionrelational nounsnominal anaphorsgenitive constructionsstimulus povertylanguage acquisitionlinguistic nativism

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 89 , Issue 4 , December 2013 , pp. 794 - 829
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This article originates in a confluence of two independent lines of research, one by Pullum and Scholz on stimulus-poverty arguments and the other by Payne and Berlage on one-anaphora. We thank the audiences at Brown University, Yale University, Newcastle University, the University of Manchester, the University of North Carolina, the Lancaster ICAME conference (Payne & Berlage 2009), and the Boston ISLE conference (Payne & Berlage 2011) for their questions and comments. Pauline Jacobson and Laura Kertz were particularly helpful to us. Barbara Scholz, who was the first to notice the mutual relevance of the two research programs, died in May 2011 before this article was completed; the other three authors bear all responsibility for remaining errors in the text (and we thank Zoltan Galsi, whose careful reading enabled us to avoid some of them).

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