Speaker: Itai Bassi and Nick Longenbaugh (MIT)
Title: Features on bound pronouns: an argument for a semantic approach [NELS practice]
Date/Time: Thursday, October 12, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Phi-features (person, gender, number) seem not to be semantically interpreted when they appear on bound pronouns. For example, in (1) the bound “my” appears to contribute an unrestricted variable, rather than a variable restricted to the speaker.
(1) Only I did my homework (bound reading: no x other than the speaker did x’s homework: for any x)
On one influential approach (Kratzer 1998, Heim 2008, a.o.), bound pronouns enter the derivation without phi-features, which are then transferred to them at PF from the binder. The spelled out phi-features are therefore absent at LF. Recent works (Sauerland 2013, Jacobson 2012, Spathas 2010 a.o.) have taken a more semantic approach which denies this ‘LF-PF mismatch’ view. Those works have argued that phi-features on bound pronouns in cases like (1) do get semantically interpreted, except that they don’t contribute to focus alternatives. This talk provides a novel argument for the semantic approach. The argument comes from the observation that (non-trivial) phi-features appear on donkey pronouns – pronouns that show covariance without c-command:
(2) Only the woman who is dating ME introduced me to her parents (sloppy reading available)
We show why cases like (2) are a problem for the morpho-syntactic approach and how they are derived on the semantic approach. We further demonstrate how our implementation of the semantic approach is advantageous over the morpho-syntactic approach in accounting for the phenomenon of split binding (Rullmann 2004).