The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly to comment on the two main generative approaches to anaphora, and secondly to advance a revised neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora based on Huang (1991, 1994, 2000a, b) and Levinson (1987, 1991, 2000). Anaphora involves syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. Although it is generally acknowledged that pragmatic factors play an important role in discourse anaphora, it is equally widely held that only syntactic and semantic factors are crucial to intrasentential anaphora. But there has been compelling cross-linguistic evidence that contrary to this popular view, the contribution of pragmatics to anaphora is much more fundamental than has been commonly believed, even at the very heart of intrasentential anaphora. In this paper I shall concentrate on that type of referential, NP-anaphora known as binding in the literature. I shall first discuss the two main generative accounts of anaphora/binding, namely the syntactic/geometric one represented by Chomsky (1981, 1995) and the semantic/reflexivity one represented by Reinhart and Reuland (1993). I shall then present a revised neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora. The underlying idea of the revised neo-Gricean pragmatic approach is that the interpretation of certain patterns of anaphora can be made using general pragmatic inference, depending on the language user's knowledge of the range of options available in the grammar, and of the systematic use or avoidance of particular linguistic expressions or structures on particular occassions. In our theory, anaphora is largely determined by the systematic interaction of the three neo-Gricean pragmatic principles proposed by Levinson (1987, 1991, 2000), namely the Q-, the M-, and the I-principles (with that order of priority), constrained by a DRP, information saliency and general consistency conditions on conversational implicatures. I shall demonstrate that by utilising these principles and the resolution mechanism organising their interaction, many patterns of preferred interpretation regarding intrasentential anaphora/binding in a large variety of genetically unrelated and structurally diverse languages can be given an elegant and satisfactory explanation.

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