Dependencies: A study of anaphoricity and scrambling

This thesis investigates interactions between structural and nonstructural principles, which determine the interpretation and distribution of anaphoric expressions and the way in which they are affected by Scrambling.;Chapter 2 begins by defining "anaphor" and adducing data in which anaphors do not obey Principle A of the Binding Theory. Chapter 2 then examines the dependencies between anaphors and their antecedents and proposes the Prominence Principle and an Interpretation Rule based on the Prominence Hierarchy that selects the most likely antecedent of an anaphor. Noting that the interpretations of anaphors are conditioned by factors such as the presence of interveners, I suggest that the interpretation of anaphors is crucially affected by the presence of a potential antecedent. Due to crosslinguistic variation in the definitions of "potential antecedent", the Prominence Principle captures parametric variation concerning the interpretation of anaphors in Chinese, English, Icelandic, Japanese, and Korean.;The dependencies between an anaphoric expression and its antecedent are sensitive to word order in that movement of the coindexed expression over anaphoric expressions affects the acceptability of the sentence, in what is called "the Crossover Effect". After sorting out factors that are relevant to the Crossover Effect, chapter 3 presents a unified set of principles that control anaphoric dependency. Data that have been previously studied as well as a new body of data are examined. In addition, the Prominence Principle is employed for the interpretation of pronouns.;Chapter 4 deals with the phenomenon of apparently optional Scrambling. The most recent development in generative grammar, the Minimalist Program is reviewed, in particular its approach to crosslinguistic word order variation. Focusing on the definition of "Optional Move" in the Minimalist Program, chapter 4 explores the possibility that Scrambling is not an instance of optional movement. The interaction between nonstructural and structural constraints imposed on scrambled elements is also investigated.