In article <bqm3pafk4g...@mid.individual.net>,
Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> > On 2014-04-09 16:51, Rick Johnson wrote:
> >> Again we have the pronoun "it" declared as the very first
> >> word of the sentence, however, the referent is missing, and
> >> instead must be intuited!
>
> Pronoun referents *always* need to be intuited. There are
> no mechanical rules for finding the referent of a pronoun
> in an English sentence; you have to figure it out from what
> makes the most sense given the context.
>
> > (A
> > postcedent is like an antecendent, except that it refers forwards to
> > something that follows instead of backwards to something that preceded.)
>
> Then there are even weirder cases, such as "It is raining
> today", where the referent ("the weather" in this case) is
> never explicitly mentioned at all!
It's even more ambiguous in Spanish. Esta lloviendo. Not only do you
get to intuit the referrent, you get to intuit the pronoun too :-)
Natural language is a wonderfully expressive thing. I open the window,
stick my head out, look up at the sky, and say, "Raining". Forget the
pronoun, I don't even have a verb. And yet everybody understands
exactly what I mean.
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