Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Expressions like the reflexives "itself" are subject to Condition A of the Binding Theory. This raises two questions: why is there a Condition A at all and why are some expressions subject to it. The classical theory - say Chomsky, 1986 - while being descriptively (relatively) adequate fails to provide answers to either question. Yet surely, answers should fall out from the architecture of syntactic theory, in particular how Condition A comes about, and from the intrinsic properties of such elements (as "itself"). 

In this presentation, I will primarily discuss "self" marked anaphors. I will review a number of existing, natural proposals regarding the intrinsic properties of self-marked elements aiming to derive their anaphoric status and the existence of Condition A. I will discuss why new observations show that none of them are tenable (they are too strong), and why they all face empirical challenges given some well known observed regularities found in natural languages. All these observations lead to a set of boundary conditions any analysis will have to meet to be successful.

I will next outline an alternative analysis meant to meet these conditions.