Syntactic Form and Discourse Accessibility

One of the central issues in studies of reference is the relationship between morpho-syntactic form and the accessibility of discourse referents. However, most of the work in this area has been concerned primarily with reference to entities; considerably less work has addressed the relationship between syntactic form and the discourse accessibility of events. In this paper, we consider forms of event reference that involve what Bolinger (1972) termed ‘identifier so’, including the do so construction. In particular, we consider those referring expressions whose antecedents are not (syntacticallymatching) VPs. In so doing, we respond to and counter a recent criticism of our previous work by Fu et al. (2001) and discuss several factors that appear to affect the accessibility of events evoked by nominalizations. Our account is based on a corpus of naturallyoccurring and felicitous examples with do so that are apparently disallowed under the Fu et al. account.