A PRAGMATIC STUDY OF ENGLISH SENTENTIAL ANAPHORS THAT AND IT

The purpose of this paper is to verify the referential properties of English sentential anaphors that and it in pragmatics by a quantitative survey that focuses on the anaphoric selection in a given discourse. Sentential anaphors that and it are pragmatically differentiated by the two main referential properties: the givenness (new vs. old) of information and the width (narrow vs. wide) of reference, with the concept of focus. These pragmatic referential properties are verified by English language users in an experimental survey, in which we can confirm that there is a statistically significant interaction between both sentential anaphoric forms and the corresponding contexts in affecting language users’ degree of acceptability, and that the nature of native language has a statistically significant effect on the subjects’ degree of acceptability for both sentential anaphors.