Locality and Logophoricity (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

Anaphors such as English herself, French elle-même or Mandarin ziji are usually claimed to obey locality requirements stated by Condition A of Binding Theory. But we observe that in various languages, the very same anaphors can be exempt from these locality requirements under certain conditions. The goal of this book is to describe and explain this widespread dual behavior of anaphors on the basis of French, English, Mandarin, Korean and Icelandic. First, several strategies are proposed for distinguishing between the two possible behaviors of anaphors. Plain instances of anaphors require local and exhaustive binding as well as sloppy readings in ellipsis. Exempt instances of anaphors, however, only require to be logophorically interpreted, that is, to occur in phrases expressing the first-personal, mental perspective of their antecedent. Second, a new theory of exempt anaphora is proposed, which consists in deriving all properties distinguishing exempt from plain anaphors to one: the presence of a silent, syntactically represented logophoric operator introducing a local, perspectival binder for superficially exempt anaphors. This hypothesis parsimoniously reduces exempt to plain anaphors obeying Condition A, thus directly accounting for the crosslinguistically widespread morphological identity of plain and exempt anaphors. Under this proposal, the reason why exempt anaphors appear to escape locality requirements is that their binder is implicit, and their mandatory logophoric interpretation derives from the nature of this binder. Finally, several diagnostics are provided for testing the hypothesis that so-called long distance anaphors can be analyzed just like exempt instances of anaphors. Binding Theory, Condition A, anaphor, reflexive, logophoricity, perspective--

• | Author: Isabelle Charnavel
• | Publisher: Oxford University Press
• | Publication Date: November 20, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 408 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0190902094
• | ISBN-13: 9780190902094