Anaphora

This project focuses on the distribution of the Greek and English reflexive in locative PPs. We focus on examples like (a) below which in Greek and Hebrew - unlike English - are not well-formed.

(a) John saw a snake next to himself.

We are running a questionnaire with several native speakers of Greek and Hebrew in order to test which factors contribute to reflexive licensing in locative prepositions. Some preliminary results of the questionnaire suggest that the Greek and Hebrew reflexives can occur prepositions which denote a path/ direction. We explore the consequences this finding has for reflexive binding and the internal structure of PPs.

Binding theory Condition A must be so formulated as to accommodate the range of behaviors exhibited by anaphors crosslinguistically. In this respect, the behavior of the Modern Greek anaphor o eaftos mu is theoretically important as it has been reported to display a number of unusual distributional properties, thus leading to treatments by Iatridou (1988) or Anagnostopoulou and Everaert (1999) different from that of standard anaphors represented by English himself and thus requiring a rethinking of the classic Condition A descriptive generalization and its theoretical derivation. This paper revisits the distribution of this expression documenting that previous discussions are subject to a confound as this expression is not always a reflexive, and it may have a logophoric usage. Controlling for the non-anaphoric usage of o eaftos mu as well as for logophoricity and relying on new data surveys, we conclude that when anaphoric, it is in fact a well-behaved standard anaphor from the point of view of the standard Condition A (akin to Chomsky 1986). These surveys support some aspects of the empirical picture presented in Anagnostopoulou and Everaert (1999) but not others. It does support an important conclusion of theirs, namely that this expression is allowed as nominative subject, but in derived subject positions only. This in turn leads to a number of new (theoretical) consequences and predictions: (a) the ability of anaphors to function as nominative subjects can be reduced to differences in their internal structure (Greek o ea.os mu 6= English himself), (b) an influential theoretical innovation made in Anagnostopoulou and Everaert (1999) which takes the reflexivization mechanism to be self incorporation as a general solution to why self induces reflexive readings cannot be maintained as a general mechanism underlying anaphor binding in Greek.