Abstract:
In
English, 'complement set' anaphora is limited or impossible: in Most
students came to class; they stayed home instead, the pronoun they can
hardly refer to the students who didn't come to class; when most is
replaced with the negative quantifier few, this reading is arguably
available. In American Sign Language (ASL), closely related data can be
obtained when a default locus is used to refer to the antecedent, and
complement set anaphora is degraded. However the facts are different
when embedded loci are used instead: a large locus A denotes the group
of all students, and a sublocus a denotes the group of students who
came to class. Without explicit introduction, the complement locus
(A-a) is then used to refer to the group of students who didn't come to
class – and this possibility is open irrespective of the monotonicity
of the quantifier. We take this anaphoric possibility from (a) the
geometric properties of plural loci qua areas of space, and (b) a
constraint that guarantees that subset and subtraction relations among
plural loci are preserved by the interpretation function ('structural
iconicity'), with the result that (A-a) gets the expected denotation.