Do thus: an investigation into anaphoric event reference

Abstract

Work on anaphoric event reference has focused on do so, do it, do this, and do that. This paper reports on an analysis of a heretofore unstudied form of event reference, do thus. Using a corpus of naturally occurring examples, I present evidence that do thus occupies the final slot in a hitherto incomplete paradigm for English event anaphora. Syntactically and semantically, do thus is similar to do so; but at the discourse level it patterns more like do this and do that. The data point to thus as an adverbial demonstrative on par with nominal this and that, which, when paired with do, can be used for complex event reference.