Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In recent years response particles, such as English "yes" and "no", have drawn the attention of theoretical linguists. Synctacticians seem to favour a deletion approach, in which a complete sentential structure is deleted under some identity condition with an antecedent. Semanticists, on the other hand, are indifferent to the notion of deleted structure and prefer defining a suitable notion of anaphoric reference. Four representative proposals of both strands of literature will be critically examined. Some evidence, also stemming from original research, will be presented that indirectly supports a deletion analysis. On the other hand, in the light of some limitations of the current syntactic analyses, the provisional conclusion will be reached that sufficiently rich semantics and discourse models are a necessity all the same.