Speaker: Sasha Podobryaev (Institut Jean Nicod)
Title: More on person features of bound pronouns
Date/Time: Thursday, May 8, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461
The focus of this talk is on the representation and interpretation of person features of bound pronouns. There has been some controversy in the literature about the licensing of such features in sentences like “Only I did my homework”. While some argue that there is a requirement of formal identity between the features of the nominal binder and the bound pronoun (cf. Heim 2008, Kratzer 2009), it has also been suggested by some others (cf. Jacobson 2013 for a recent example) that the features of bound pronouns do not depend on the features of their binders in any direct way.
Relying primarily on the evidence from Collins and Postal 2012, I show that both approaches are valid to a certain extent. I argue that there are at least two kinds of person features that can show up on bound pronouns: features of referential indices (cf. Minor 2011, Sudo 2012) licensed under identity with the features of the binder, and presuppositional head features (cf. Sauerland 2008, a.o.) that are licensed independently.