We used to ascribe such differences of judgment rather lamely to dialect differences.  The joke in the early seventies was dialect change was very responsive to theory.  Actually, I first used this example and argument in the syntax portion of my Ph.D. qualifying exam at UCLA in 1968, arguing that subordination had a non-syntactic dimension; we didn't use the term "pragmatic" in those days.  And I got away with it.  I have run into others who can't get the cataphoric interpretation, although sometimes a richer context helps.  However, the theoretical point is independent of this judgment:  what appear to be interclausal phenomena and thus syntactic are frequently pragmatic and simply show up in predictable ways in the appropriate syntactic structures.  But they can occur without that structure.  This applies, for instance, to a variety of adverbial relationships.  In Classical Hebrew there are very few subordinating conjunctions, and clausal subordination is rare, but what's called the waw-consecutive construction is very common, the consonant waw (vav) being also the conjunction "and".  You can get a sense of the frequency of this construction by the frequency of the phrase "and it came to pass" in the King James Version of the Hebrew Bible, a literal translation of the waw-consecutive plus a form of the verb "be", wjhj.  Actually, these get interpreted as various adverbial subordinate clauses depending on context, but the interpretation is largely pragmatic.  You can get a similar thing in conversational English parataxis.

 

Herb



	

	 



	Sorry, Herb, I can't get the cataphora to work, no matter how I intone 

	or stress the sentence. It feels a tiny bit better with your contour, 

	but still highly aberrant. 



	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

	Johanna Rubba   Associate Professor, Linguistics 

	English Department, California Polytechnic State University 

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