Resolving Backgrounds

The aim of this paper is to treat background (non-focus) elements as anaphoric, i.e. as objects which are formally subject to the same conditions which hold for other anaphora. The idea that backgrounds are anaphoric is inherent in many approaches to information structure, but they are rarely treated as such formally. I will discuss two problems which seem to challenge a strict anaphoricity approach to backgrounds: the problem of non-identity between background and its antecedent, where one is more informative than the other, and the fact that a background may be seemingly anaphoric to an antecedent contained within a scope island. In order to resolve the scope problem I will assume that every existential NP presupposes the existence of a kind it realizes. On the other hand I will assume that different kinds of backgrounds, links and tails in Vallduví’s (1992) terminology, introduce different anaphoricity conditions. The anaphoric relation between a background and its antecedent does not necessarily have to be one of identity; links can be more descriptive than their antecedent while tails can be more general.