So Be It: The Discourse-Semantic Roles of So and It

The aim of the article is to determine whether so and /'( fulfil distinct discourse-building roles, in their predicateand proposition-anaphoric guise. Is the choice between them determined by the syntactic or semantic nature of their 'antecedent', or of the context in which the choice between them is to be made? Or do they in fact themselves determine their 'antecedent' (or at least superimpose upon it a characteristically distinctive interpretation)? I shall argue for the latter analysis, indicating a range of factors (of a mainly semantic nature) which co-determine both the choice between these two anaphors, and their full utterance-level interpretation. A wide range of attested and constructed examples will be presented as the basis for the discussion.