Constructions with propositional proforms

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of constructions with propositional proforms in three languages: English, German and Hungarian. Starting from the position that these elements are not meaningless expletives, four strategies are identified, which are different in terms of the syntactic/semantic type of the proform (regular pronoun, specialized propositional pronoun, pronoun realizing an elided nominal) and the way a clause is associated with them (anaphoric reference, adjunction, unification). The different analyses are justified based on formal differences (morphosyntactic features, selectional restrictions) and they are compatible with the architecture of LFG, previous analyses, as well as framework-independent theoretical considerations.