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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.1182-1191
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 26 Jun 2025 Revised 23 Jul 2025 Accepted 05 Aug 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202508.1182

The Reciprocal Interpretation of the Do so Anaphor in English

Juwon Lee
Assistant Professor, Department of English Education Jeonju University 303, Cheonjam-ro, Wansan-gu, Jeonju-si, Jeonbuk-do 55069, Korea Tel: 063-220-2326 juwonlee@jj.ac.kr


© 2025 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study examines a novel interpretation of the English do so anaphor—namely, the reciprocal reading. While prior research has established that do so in English permits the canonical strict and sloppy readings, recent work on the Korean kule-anaphor (do so anaphor) (Lee 2025) has identified a third interpretation in which the thematic roles of subject and object are reversed across coordinated clauses. This reciprocal interpretation—as in The student likes the teacher, and the teacher does so, too (interpreted as The student and the teacher like each other)—cannot be reduced to either the strict or sloppy readings, as it reflects a bidirectional relation between the individuals involved. The present study first examines whether this reciprocal reading is also possible in English do so constructions, and if so, under what semantic conditions it arises. Through a controlled experiment, the study finds that the reciprocal reading in English received relatively high acceptability scores, albeit with weaker constraints than in Korean. These findings contribute to the theoretical understanding of verbal anaphora by challenging purely syntactic accounts and suggesting a role for conceptual and discourse-level processes. They also bear typological significance, showing that reciprocal interpretations may form part of a broader cross-linguistic pattern in do so-type constructions.

Keywords:

do so anaphor, strict reading, sloppy reading, reciprocal reading, coreference, converseness, experiment, English

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