Talk:so

Pro-form

@Brett: Any thoughts on the newly added section? Victor Bob [talk] 14:10, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

My first thought is that it's better to consult and then edit, rather than edit and then consult.

My second thought it that PRONOUN denotes a lexical category; PRO-FORM does not. A pro-form is a constituent that gets its meaning anaphorically. The set of pro-forms is a semantic set with no coherent syntactic properties. It would be suitable as a context tag, but not as a category.--Brett (talk) 14:29, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with you that PRO-FORM is a semantic term rather than a syntactic category. Nonetheless, the authors of CGEL (p. 1538) say that we prefer to classify anaphoric so simply as a pro-form. I don't really know why they make such a simple categorisation that I am not fully persuaded that so isn't a pronoun. Victor Bob [talk] 14:54, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

But again, that is a semantic classification. Pro-form is not one of their lexical categories. I read them as saying, we're not going to categorize it as a pronoun, but we'll note that it is semantically similar.--Brett (talk) 16:25, 19 November 2023 (UTC)