‘So’ as a TP-substituting Propositional Anaphor

Abstract

This paper revisits some interesting asymmetry observed between that-clause and ‘so’ in English. Despite the fact that that-clauses embedded within an array of verb phrases can be pro-formed by ‘so’, the ones embedded within morphologically related noun phrases cannot. Moulton (2015) attempted to offer an account of this asymmetrical phenomenon by proposing that, contra standard assumptions, that-clauses embedded within those verb phrases are predicates rather than arguments in a parallel fashion to those embedded within derivationally related nouns. In other words, he argues that, based on derivational relatedness, the semantico-syntactic function of that-clause within a noun phrase can be extended to a verb phrase as well. We explore this issue by re-examining the syntactic distribution of ‘so’ and the semantic function of that-clause embedded within two distinct syntactic categories, a noun phrase and a verb phrase. We then propose that ‘so’ is a TP-substituting propositional anaphor. In so doing, we argue that there exist two types of CPs (cross-linguistically) and that these distinctions account for different syntactic behaviors of ‘so’ as a propositional anaphor in a variety of constructions. © 2022 KASELL All rights reserved.